The first real stage of a voice agent is turning sound into words, and it's harder than it looks. Modern ASR is astonishingly good on clean audio, but real conversations are full of noise, accents, and disfluencies, and — for a voice agent — the transcript has to arrive fast and incrementally, while the model also figures out when the user has actually stopped talking. This post covers ASR for real-time voice.
The first real stage of a voice agent is turning sound into words, and it's harder than it looks. Modern ASR is astonishingly good on clean audio, but real conversations are full of noise, accents, and disfluencies — and the transcript has to arrive fast and incrementally while the model figures out when the user has actually stopped talking. ASR for real-time voice.
Sound is the modality that makes AI conversational — the difference between typing to a machine and talking to it. And the same architectural ideas that transformed text and vision transformed audio too: treat the waveform as a sequence, train at scale, and one model can transcribe speech across languages, or synthesize a natural-sounding voice from text. Understanding how AI handles audio — recognition, synthesis, and understanding — completes the picture of the core modalities and shows how general the multimodal recipe has become.
Sound is the modality that makes AI conversational — the difference between typing to a machine and talking to it. The same architectural ideas that transformed text and vision transformed audio too: treat the waveform as a sequence, train at scale, and one model can transcribe speech across languages, or synthesize a natural voice from text.