From Voice Agents to AI Avatars with Alexander Smola - #777

Voice AI has gotten very good over the past few years, but it still suffers from a bit of an uncanny valley problem.

It goes beyond the title with direct discussion of know, think, it's, including: Humans are remarkably sensitive to the subtle things that make a conversation feel natural or not.

1. 01A little too much latency, an interruption handled awkwardly, the wrong tone or emotional response, and suddenly the illusion breaks
2. 02Our conversation explores what it takes to build these systems, from the models and inference infrastructure needed to make voice work in real time, to emotional intelligence, and
3. 03And so I think what this is converging to is that you'll be talking to an AV agent that looks and feels like a human