These execs think voice AI hasn’t reached its ChatGPT moment yet

语音作为下一个重要交互界面的理论已经获得了强大的动力，投资者向语音人工智能初创公司投入了数十亿美元，涵盖了从模型制造商到企业客户服务提供商，以及从会议记录员到人工智能驱动的听写等各个领域。每周都有新的模型或工具发布，声称听起来像人类并能像人类一样交谈。然而，现实情况可能并非如此。企业语音人工智能平台 PolyAI 的首席技术官 Shawn Wen 认为，尽管发布了全双工模型（即可以在听你说话的同时进行回复），但语音人工智能尚未迎来其“ChatGPT 时刻”。

“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.

“我们已经达到了开发全双工模型的里程碑。下一个挑战是使推理变得非常快，以便模型能够快速获取答案，并使对话感觉自然，”他在上个月的 HumanX 会议舞台上对我说道。他还表示，客户服务中的人工智能代理不应该听起来像机器人，应该让来电者有足够的信心相信它们能够解决问题。

“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.

“我认为下一个阶段会略有不同，因为一旦语音足够好，并且客户愿意与它们进行前两三次的交流，他们就会开始建立信心。随着时间的推移，如果代理能够解决我的问题，他们会觉得我可能不需要与人类交谈了，”他说。会议记录工具 Otter 的首席营销官 Alex Gay 认为，说话人识别、意图捕捉以及将其与组织知识相结合是实现自动化的关键步骤。

The company is also working on digital twins that might represent people in meetings. For that technology, he said it’s paramount that the output voice gives the same emotive expressions of talking to a human in a meeting. “If you think about the meetings that you’re in right now, the best conversations that you have are where you can have debate, and strategic discussions, and when you feel like there’s a relationship that underpins it. If you aren’t able to have that with an avatar, then it’s just a q and a chatbot,” Gay noted.

该公司还在开发可能代表会议中人员的数字孪生体。对于这项技术，他表示，输出的语音能够提供与会议中与真人交谈时相同的感性表达至关重要。“如果你想想你现在参加的会议，你所进行的最棒的对话是那些你可以进行辩论和战略讨论的对话，并且当你感觉到有一种关系作为支撑时。如果你无法通过虚拟形象实现这一点，那么它就只是一个问答聊天机器人，”Gay 指出。

Voice AI’s understanding and transparency While voice AI models have improved, AI assistants often don’t understand users, or your meeting notetaker shows the wrong transcript or a summary. Wen thinks that ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) models often miss important keywords, and that creates an issue in capturing the whole context. Otter’s Gay agreed with this, adding that the company keeps working on improving transcription.

语音人工智能的理解与透明度。虽然语音人工智能模型已经有所改进，但人工智能助手往往无法理解用户，或者你的会议记录工具显示了错误的转录或摘要。Wen 认为，自动语音识别（ASR）模型经常遗漏重要的关键词，这在捕捉完整语境方面造成了问题。Otter 的 Gay 同意这一点，并补充说该公司一直在努力改进转录功能。

He also said that language is one area where voice models need to improve. “For Otter, you know, transcription was never the end point. It was just the layer that we could start to drive some of the productivity gains on the back of. But if your original transcription didn’t have the accuracy that you needed, all the follow-up actions that you have become flawed. And the minute that starts to take action, that is wrong. You lose trust in the platform. It is critical for us to continue to improve that ASR model because all of the downstream impacts are significant,” he said.

他还表示，语言是语音模型需要改进的一个领域。“对于 Otter 来说，你知道，转录从来都不是终点。它只是我们可以借此推动一些生产力提升的层级。但如果你的原始转录没有达到你需要的准确度，你所有的后续行动都会变得有缺陷。一旦开始采取行动，那就是错误的。你会失去对平台的信任。对我们来说，继续改进那个 ASR 模型至关重要，因为所有的下游影响都是巨大的，”他说。

With the new voice tools, there is also a question of transparency. Tools should declare to customers that they are being recorded or talking to AI. Otter said that it wants to instill trust in people who are in a meeting, so even for a meeting where the bot is not present, it wants to try methods like notifying everyone in the chat that the meeting is being recorded. PolyAI’s Wen also said that it’s important to establish that people are talking to an AI in enterprise calls.

随着新的语音工具的出现，还存在一个透明度的问题。工具应该向客户声明他们正在被录音或正在与人工智能交谈。Otter 表示，它希望在会议参与者中建立信任，因此即使在机器人不在场的会议中，它也希望尝试诸如在聊天中通知所有人会议正在被录音之类的方法。PolyAI 的 Wen 也表示，在企业通话中明确告知人们正在与人工智能交谈非常重要。