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Debates

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

22:57 20VC: Chips, Models or Applications; Where is the Value in AI | Is Compute the Answer to All Model Performance Questions | Why Open AI Shelved AGI & Is There Any Value in Models with OpenAI Price Dumping with Aidan, Gomez, Co-Founder @ Cohere

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

65:28 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

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.