A16Z AI Voice Update 2025

> Voice agents allow businesses to be available to their customers 24/7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, or complete purchases. Customer availability and business availability no longer have to match 1:1 (ever tried to call an East Coast bank after 3 p.m. PT?). With voice agents, every business can always be online.

I don't get it -- textual support chatbots have been around for decades. Even if we accept the premise that people would rather speak to them by voice, how do voice agents represent some kind of sea change in availability?

(And I personally find customer support chatbots deeply frustrating to use for reasons that have nothing to do with the modality or the quality of the AI model. I only ever need to use one when the question I have is not answered in the documentation, which is often the extent of the chatbot's business-specific training data. Inevitably I end up being led in circles, screaming for a human.)

First, I can't listen to this article so this makes their point kinda less relevant.

> It is the most frequent (and information dense)

Second, this is false. Voice is effective when the sensory context is available to both people, e.g. in the dinner table where "pass the salt" makes immediate sense. Otherwise it is an erratic form of communication, prone to misunderstanding, often repetitive and redundant.

It is not more information dense, but it is the most immediate. The latency of AI applications makes its immediacy less useful.

I'm pretty convinced that voice interaction will be the biggest UI change since apps.

Voice is simply natural to humans. Downloading an app to learn about the departure of the next bus is not.

I used voice bots to let my 5-year-old play role-playing games (e.g., checking into a hotel) or let my parents (60+) call a fake car dealership.

It's amazing to observe. They behave as if they're talking to a human, especially when doing it via a phone. That is exactly the UX a computer system should have—simply a phone number and voice.

As soon as people have to learn something new (a new webpage, a new app, etc.), something is wrong.

> For enterprises, AI directly replaces human labor with technology. It's cheaper, faster, more reliable — and often even outperforms humans.

That’s… quite the claim. I guess we’re picking the worst people, the best voice-based AI, the easiest of scenarios, and a total desire for humanity to remove other human from interaction.

Pretty dark and sinister if you ask me.

I have yet to 'meet' a voice AI on a phone. If I do and I can tell; I will hang up and the company just lost a client. I am a person and I like speaking to persons not machines. If a company thinks I am not worth talking to a human you are not worth my money.

Voice is the most dense form of communication? Maybe if AI does stt perfectly all the time, but then the reverse, tts is really not very efficient for me; I read far faster and can do a fast skim (taking milliseconds) to see if the answer is in there or reprompt instead of having to listen to the slow warbling of something/someone only to conclude it was worthless. Oh and tts, at least for me, is not perfect; it often gets things wrong making the other side return nonsense too.

I'd much rather type questions than ask them. Being able to review what I've written before I hit send gives me a sense of control lacking in voice interfaces.

Lots of negativity in the comments. if voice works, it's a superior UI than GUI. It's an article from an investment firm that are betting on this. Nothing wrong with that

Wow, lot’s of negative responses here on voice. I’m a reader. I read. A lot. And I still think 4o’s advanced voice mode is unique, extremely useful, and I dearly wish we had open models or even some closed competitive models that were as good as it.

I will note that the model has been successively nerfed, massively, from launch, you can watch some demo pre-launch videos, or just try out some basic engagement, for instance, try asking it to talk to you in various accents and see which ones Open AI deems “inappropriate” to ask for and which are fine. This kind of enshittification I think is pretty likely when you are the only one in town with a product.

That said, even moderately enshittified, there’s something magic about an end to end trained multimodal model — it can change tone of voice on request. In fact, my standard prompt asks it to mirror my tone of voice and cadence. This is really unique. It’s not achievable through a whisper -> LLM -> Synthesizer/TTS approach. It can give you a Boston accent, speculate that a Marseille accent is the equivalent in French, and then (at least try) to give you a Marseille accent. This is pretty strong medicine, and I love it.

There’s been so much LLM commoditization this year, and of course the chains keep moving forward on intelligence. But, I hope Ms. Moore is correct that we’ll see better and more voice models soon, and that someone can crack the architecture.

I think many of the negative comments in this thread haven't seen recently the human-machine interactions of the young generations with Siri and her chatbot friends.

AI voice is like AI art. I am sure many people will appreciate it and love it.

But the whole point of this medium is that you want the humanity and personality. Otherwise just use text.

I'm not convinced TTS can get all the way to the quality of professional actors for things like audiobooks.

I'll take a professional actor over TTS any day - incomparably better quality even with the best TTS.