Why Voice AI Is Hard to Listen To

Artificial intelligence has gotten great at automating customer support emails and text chats. But automating customer support phone calls is far more challenging because AI that can understand and generate human-sounding speech is still too costly, slow and unreliable, said Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagon, a developer of AI for customer support.

Decagon gets around the voice AI limitations by transcribing audio to text, then feeding it into an AI model that processes text. After the model produces a text response, Decagon’s system uses models from ElevenLabs, OpenAI or Deepgram to convert the text back to audio.