The theory of voice being the next big interface has picked up strong momentum, with investors pouring billions of dollars into voice AI startups working on areas ranging from model makers to enterprise customer service providers, and from meeting note-takers to AI-powered dictation.

Every week there is a new model or a tool release that claims to sound human and converse like one. However, in reality, that might not be the case. Enterprise voice AI platform PolyAI’s CTO Shawn Wen thinks that despite the release of full-duplex models — which can speak while listening to you — voice AI doesn’t have its “ChatGPT moment” yet.

“We have reached the milestone of developing full-duplex models. The next challenge is to make reasoning very fast, so that the models can fetch answers quickly and the conversation feels natural,” he told me on stage at the HumanX conference last month.

He also said that 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, opined that speaker identification, intent capture, and typing that up with organizational knowledge is a key step for enabling automation.

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