Neil Zeghidour

The talk explores the current state of voice AI and the challenges in achieving a "Her moment," where AI voices are indistinguishable from humans and seamlessly integrated into conversations. While significant progress has been made in speech-to-text and text-to-speech, true conversational fluency, low latency, and the ability to handle complex tool calls remain major hurdles. The presentation contrasts cascaded systems with end-to-end speech-to-speech models, highlighting the limitations of current half-duplex speech-to-speech models in replicating human conversational nuances like overlapping speech and backchanneling.