Voice AI Has Not Reached Its ChatGPT Moment, Executives Say

Wen said the next challenge is making reasoning very fast so models can fetch answers quickly and conversations feel natural. He also said AI agents in customer service should not sound robotic and should give callers enough confidence that they can solve problems. “I think the next stage will be slightly different because once the voice is good enough, like, and the customer is willing to engage with them for the first two or three turns, they start to build confidence, and over time, they will feel like I probably don’t have to talk to a human if the agent can solve my problem,” he said.

Alex Gay, CMO for meeting notetaker Otter, said speaker identification, intent capture and typing that up with organizational knowledge are key steps for enabling automation. Otter is also working on digital twins that might represent people in meetings. For that technology, Gay said it is paramount that the output voice gives the same emotive expressions as talking to a human in a meeting. “If you think about the meetings that you’re in right now, the best conversations that you have are where you can have debate, and strategic discussions, and when you feel like there’s a relationship that underpins it. If you aren’t able to have that with an avatar, then it’s just a q and a chatbot,” Gay noted.

While voice AI models have improved, AI assistants often do not understand users, and meeting notetakers can show the wrong transcript or summary. Wen thinks ASR models often miss important keywords, creating an issue in capturing the whole context. Gay agreed and said Otter keeps working on improving transcription. He also said language is one area where voice models need to improve. “For Otter, you know, transcription was never the end point. It was just the layer that we could start to drive some of the productivity gains on the back of. But if your original transcription didn’t have the accuracy that you needed, all the follow-up actions that you have become flawed. And the minute that starts to take action, that is wrong. You lose trust in the platform. It is critical for us to continue to improve that ASR model because all of the downstream impacts are significant,” he said.

With new voice tools, there is also a question of transparency. Tools should declare to customers that they are being recorded or talking to AI. Otter said it wants to instill trust in people who are in a meeting, so even for a meeting where the bot is not present, it wants to try methods like notifying everyone in the chat that the meeting is being recorded. PolyAI’s Wen also said it is important to establish that people are talking to an AI in enterprise calls.