Will voice become the primary interface for AI-native technology, or will other modalities dominate?
5 recorded positions from 5 people, first said Aug 19, 2024. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Voice is becoming the primary interface
Aidan Gomez · Aug 19, 2024
Voice-based conversation with these models is a stunning and highly compelling interface experience.
Voice conversation with a model is a stunning, shocking experience — emotion, inflection, breathing, lip smacking make it uniquely compelling
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Luke Harries · May 23, 2025
Conversational voice AI agents do work — he was completely wrong to think latency would make sub-200ms natural conversations impossible
After helping around twenty customers build conversational AI agents at ElevenLabs, it was clear enough to turn into a full platform product
Scope: stated as a mind-change over the last twelve months
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Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025
Voice is becoming the primary interface for the technology around us
The interaction layer is shifting toward agentic voice platforms, which is why ElevenLabs expanded from dubbing to everything voice
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David Cahn · Oct 27, 2025
Voice is wildly undervalued as the interface for AI
Staring at phones is not the terminal interface to technology; earlier voice products were bad (couldn't be interrupted, no memory, obviously robotic) but Sesame showed a radically better experience with immediate product-market fit
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Also on the record
Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025
Salesforce's Agentforce demo use case — calling a help desk to check and change an order — is less efficient than a well-designed portal with a button in the email
Good UX handles it in one click, whereas voice agents likely won't recognize a non-native accent and will ask complex identification questions
55:22 Well designed ux beats voice agent interfaces for routine tasks
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.