“I think you said, ‘representative.’” It’s the fastest way to bypass automated speech recognition chatbots that fail to route human callers to the service they need. Achieving a human handoff to a living, breathing representative still feels like a badge of honor.

Naomi Moneypenny, senior director of product development at Microsoft Foundry Models division, blogged on October 1 to introduce three new Microsoft AI (MAI) models in Microsoft Foundry, Redmond’s app and agent model catalog and platform.

“A voice agent has to do more than hear a request and produce a reply. It has to keep the interaction moving while it listens, reasons, uses tools, and speaks. A delay at either end can turn a conversation into a series of awkward pauses,” writes Moneypenny.

Available now in Microsoft Foundry, the latest voice-centric models include MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, which turns live speech into text as it is spoken; MAI-Voice-2.1, an expressive multilingual text-to-speech model; and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, optimized for responsive, high-volume voice applications.

Instead of waiting for a person to finish speaking before returning text, the technology (which has automatic language detection) produces its first hypotheses (known as partials, associated with the field of incremental speech recognition) within the “low hundreds of milliseconds” of receiving audio. The model then refines the partials as more context arrives, before committing to a stable transcript once an utterance ends.

“A live transcription experience can surface words almost as quickly as they are spoken.”

“That distinction matters when an application needs to act while someone is speaking.

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