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lines on the record: 39
first: 2025-03-18
most recent: 2025-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Founders that maybe have only been in the industry for six months, a year, even less, but are becoming quickly opinionated about what they need to build and probably most importantly just building really quickly and testing, getting feedback and going from there.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that has been really interesting, and maybe it's just the standard tech platform shift, but we're seeing founders that are maybe new to an industry but spend a couple months going really deep, able to build the most powerful and the highest growth and the highest inflection products. And that's just because I think the rules of the game are changing. Type of and power of products you can build is also above anything that we've ever seen. And so if you move quickly in many ways like shipping fast becomes the moat and you can catch up on everything else like the industry expertise, the networks, the knowledge base, the resourcing, all of that. And so I would say that has been one of the areas where we get most excited.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Following you around all the time. And so we actually get very excited by founders who are opinionated in how to build the voice agent as its own character, its own personality, that the user is forming a bond with versus the voice agents we've had in the past where the user is treating them as a machine that they're handing basic tasks to.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This kid said, What we're looking for in voice companion products, but even any consumer voice agent, like there has to be some friction. If it's like too easy to build the relationship, if they're always saying yes to you, if they're not giving you the brutally honest feedback, then it gets old quickly. There's no value for you as a consumer to just have a yes man or yes woman following.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the average consumer would in their head like a Siri doesn't even compete with a chat GBT voice mode or something like that because they're just such different feelings that you get as a user when you are using them.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree. I think there's one or two categories or use cases where the calls have truly commoditized or will commoditize and they user experience matters less and like Google might take those. For example, they recently launched the ability to call a restaurant, get availability, and then come back to you and give you the options. If you can add that as a button on a Google search, that probably makes sense to do through them, but are they going to build the first AI native personal assistant that works across all of your products and all of your information sources? Probably not, I would say. And so I think that any and all of the calls that the incumbents end up doing, which will be some volume, are probably not going to be the type of calls that are going to support a large and exciting standalone new startup.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a specialized interface to provide most of the value, especially if the best models maybe are right now being held by OpenAI versus being available via API for any kind of standalone voice agent company to utilize. I would say the biggest and best consumer companies are often surprises and are non obvious. And so my gut is whatever we see working in consumer voice is going to be something that is hard to sit here and speculate on. It'll be.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say B2B voice agents are more obvious than consumer or B2C voice agents just because again it's the use case of replacing existing spend on humans on the phone for businesses. For consumers maybe the corollary there would be these high cost, hard to access services that can now be performed by a voice agent instead of a human. So therapy and mental health support is one of those. EdTech is another big one. Language learning, teaching your kid how to read, teaching your kid how to do math which I think a lot of parents struggle with coaching how to have hard personal conversations. The main I think open question on the consumer voice agents have been when a chatGBT or soon a claude can do a pretty good job with a lot of those basic consumer use cases where are the verticals or use cases where you need either a specialized model”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do think the go-to market will depend on the vertical. There's, say, restaurants, home services businesses, spas or nail salons. Those are very fragmented long tail of smaller players. And so in those cases, the data does exist in each of their hands. Whereas again, banks or financial institutions is maybe one where there's a lot of concentration in a few players. One or two big customers. And if it takes you six, nine months to get them on board, great versus the salon restaurant home services voice agent provider might be much more focused on getting a thousand customers within the same time frame.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the types of moats that has been the most intriguing for us, I would say, especially for enterprises, is the self-improving data moat. So if you are going to take over calls for, say, a large bank, they have a certain way that they want those to be done. And so you're not going to plug in a voice agent and have 100% NPS on day one. It's going to take months and months of training calls to make that better. And so you as a voice agent provider, if you get in early, benefit from having all that special proprietary data that just gives you months of a head start for anyone else who has to come along and go through that entire onboarding and integration and training process. And so I think the hope for a lot of these vertical voice companies is that they will be able to use the call data either per customer or anonymized across a customer set to make the model”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see moats in a couple ways. So, one would be integrations. And this is, I think, why we're especially excited about these more vertically focused voice agents. It's not going to make sense for OpenAI to go integrate with every long tail transportation management software that a freight company is going to be able to need to run their fleet of trucks on a voice agent product. And similarly, UI, like OpenAI and other companies have a pretty set system.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to have like early. I mean, I think similar to what we've seen in the SaaS landscape, like not every company price is the same. It depends on the end customer. It depends on the vertical, it depends on the features that you're offering. My gut is that we'll see some combination of the usage-based per-call pricing combined with some sort of broader platform or outcome or seat-based pricing, so it won't just be one model, but it's very early days still.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you get it right, obviously you are then tying your value most clearly to the value that you're generating for the business. But we're interested to see how those scale for enterprises, because I think a lot of enterprises are maybe nervous to commit to that kind of payment structure, especially if they're not sure exactly what kind of volume they're going to be driving through it.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a few more creative pricing experiments we've seen as well. The recruiting one is a good example where in these cases where the voice agent is a co-pilot to the human, you can almost charge per human that is using the voice agent, like a per seat SAS model almost. So for a human recruiter, it might save them. I don't know, five, ten hours per week of doing interviews. And so you can charge $500, $1,000 per recruiter per month. And then the last one, and maybe the most experimental one is outcome-based pricing, which I feel like is a question across all of AI right now. For sure. And are we moving towards that version of the world now? So maybe it's $5 per appointment booked. Maybe it's five percent of the booking value.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it really just puts your value as a platform solely on the phone calls, which again are commoditizing versus like the other software that you're building around the phone calls? So I would say as a result of that, we've seen a lot of companies evolve from just doing price per minute to some sort of platform fee. Maybe it's per month, maybe it's per module where the customer is also paying for things that they get in addition to the voice agent.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's early. It's changing every month. And I would say that's maybe the number one question that we get from companies is how should I price? How do you see other companies in the space pricing? I think we've seen a few models that are starting to work or that people are experimenting with. So the most obvious one is you just charge per minute so you can calculate an hourly rate for the voice agent similar to what you would pay a human. There's a couple maybe wrinkles here. One would be a lot of these customers are informed enough to know that the underlying technology is getting cheaper. So they will come to you and say, hey, why am I still paying 30 cents per minute when your costs have gone down and you're probably just taking all of that in margin? And then as these spaces get more competitive, it's very easy then for a newcomer to come in and say, hey, I'm going to only charge five cents per minute and just undercut you based on that. And then the other thing about the price per minute model.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constrained point, but even though the voice agent is still probably doing better than your human agents, most businesses don't want to pay that much for it because it is AI and they see it as a way to cut costs. So in these verticals where you can offer it to customers at, I don't know, 70% discount to what they were paying before. That has been, I would say very, very powerful as well. And then I would say the other kind of main factor is these verticals where it really is crucial for the business to answer the call. But for the end consumer, if there's a mistake here or there, it's okay. So, like a restaurant order versus getting a healthcare diagnosis. There's like a little bit of a different level of urgency, I would say.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So definitely, I think the lowest hanging early fruit, I guess, to grab would be these businesses that are already paying for a call center because they're already spending a lot of money on it and it's already a pain point for them. Call centers are notoriously high turnover. They're hard to manage. So most businesses honestly probably probably want to get rid of that if they can. The models are good now. They're just getting better and better every month. So I think we're still in a world where when the call has a constrained process and outcome businesses are more comfortable. So for example, the voice agent knows going in my goal is to book an appointment with this person versus maybe an amorphous. How do you even measure if this call was successful? We've seen some AI therapy voice agents, which are amazing and I think are improving all the time. But in that case, it's much harder for the voice agent to know at the end of the call. Did I do a good job? It's much harder for the company to know at the end of the call. Did it complete the objective? And then I would say this gets back to the”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“80% of the time, and AI will just do it every time and will do it proudly. And if they get turned down, they're just going to move on to the hundred other calls that they're doing simultaneously.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that's back office, it's not client facing, so it's less sensitive. But if you're, say, a doctor's office, you probably have humans that you're paying a lot spending hours on the phone every day with pharmacies, with insurers. And that is time that they could have spent with your patients or making the clinic operate better. And so those kinds of calls are super obvious and like a great idea for voice agents to tackle. And then maybe the most interesting one and one that we've talked about a lot is there are so many types of calls or interactions where humans are not incentivized to do them well. Maybe they have to make an upsell and it's awkward, but they are not getting an extra commission for doing that. So they're going to skip it.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the consumer never activates it. Does it actually make sense to call him after one or two or three days and get them to do that? I've seen a couple voice agents that are really successful now with that use case alone.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Yeah. I would say a lot of businesses, I mean, small businesses to enterprise alike are for their own reasons like nervous to hand over all of their phone calls and customer interactions to an AI. And so we'll often see these voice agents start with a specific wedge that just feels so obvious in terms of ROI to the business. And then as they gain trust, expand from there. So one of the most obvious and easiest ones are these after hours or overflow calls. So if you're a small business, you probably live or die by the ability to get an appointment booked. Having that handled by an AI is a no-brainer. Like at the very least, they can get a phone number and information and call back, but maybe they can actually book a full appointment for you and have a job on deck for the next day, which is awesome. But beyond that, there are some calls that just don't make sense to make right now if you're paying human labor. If you're a credit card company, you send out a credit card.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's some companion platforms that are voiced first. For example, character AI added a voice mode, and it got some crazy amount of usage and beta. I think actually a lot of people are taking, for example, inflections PI app or chat GPT in voice mode and using it as a companion. And you might try it once because you're driving or you're hands-free or it feels more convenient. But I mean, you say this a lot. In many cases, the AI is more human than the human. Even your best friend, if you give them a call, they might be busy. They're at work. They're having a bad day. Are they actually going to listen to every single word that you're saying and respond in like an empathetic way and a thoughtful way? And so actually the AI does that 100% of the time. They have more expertise, more knowledge, more resources. So I think a lot of people, and this will only get better as the models improve because we're still in the early days, but a lot of people are shocked by.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The human at the end actually often likes it better because it's unbiased. Like it's the same AI that's evaluating everyone. It's evaluating them based on your actual performance, not based on whether they like you more or less than someone else that they might be evaluating. So that's been, I would say, very interesting angle for us too.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been some very, at least to me, non obvious examples and use cases. Recruiting is one. So there's like Publicly traded staffing companies that do interviews for yes, blue collar jobs, but also engineering jobs, a massive range of them. And what we find is that a lot of candidates would actually prefer talking to an AI interviewer than talking to a human recruiter that maybe has to take 10 calls that day. Is tired, is in a bad mood, doesn't really have the technical depth, and maybe doesn't have the technical expertise for every single job that they're interviewing for to understand what are the smart follow-up questions to really get at their expertise. And so that's one example of you would think that a human would be shocked, offended, upset to find themselves interviewing with an AI, but in many cases by the end of the interview, they're actually more excited and more positive about it than you would think.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much every vertical now has a voice agent company, which is really exciting. I think Tonisha's point actually, when we talk to most voice agent companies, they aren't necessarily replacing existing software or at least to start, but they're probably actually allowing businesses to either cut down on human labor”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the next wave that we're starting to see is a lot more verticalized. And I think it makes sense because the ability to build a voice agent has commoditized. If even I can make somewhat of a performant voice agent with models that are available. And so now we're seeing companies think beyond, okay, you have the voice agent using that as a wedge. What is the next level of software that you can build? Can you build the AI native vertical SaaS product for an industry using that voice agent? Can you invent a new system of record? What can you do next? And so that leads you into being a little bit more focused and verticalized. And that's where a lot of the YC companies are landing, I think.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“YC founders are typically young, high hustle, ambitious, and they're like heat seeking missiles. And so they will pivot until they get into a space that's interesting. So in recent YC cohorts, upwards of 20, 25% of companies are building with AI voice, which is really exciting. We're even seeing a lot of companies from past cohorts all the way back to like 2019, 2020 are going back now and pivoting into AI voice. The first wave after the infrastructure company's invoice we saw were pretty horizontal platforms that allow anyone, any business, any consumer to build a broad-based voice agent. Like I built one that called the DMV for me and scheduled an appointment, which was very useful.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we're seeing more companies like Sesame is a good example in our portfolio, introducing things like that in the model, which just ups the realness factor.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very few humans just speak perfectly with no interruptions, with no weird little inflections, with no pauses. And so Notebook LM is one example where that sounded so human because they put in all of these things that like to an AI might feel like an error, but to a human, it sounds like another human talking.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another unlock that I've noticed has made particular amount of progress in the last three to four months is emotionality. So if you say something that is supposed to be sad, does the AI sound a little down or a little sad when it responds? Does it pick up the pace? Does it pick up the pitch at which it's talking back to you? And then lastly, I think there's not a term for this yet. Maybe we should come up with one. But like the dialogue structure, I think that to an AI model, they will know exactly what words they want to say back to you, right? So there's no reason for them to put in any pauses, any gaps, any little vocal ticks. But to a human listener”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one would be humanness of the voice. So, again, hearkening back to Siri or Alexa, does it sound like a robot or does it sound like a real person? Were investors in companies like 11 Labs that have built very deep models that either have preset voices that sound real or that you can design your own character voice essentially, depending on your use case?”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, definitely sub 300 milliseconds. Got it. Sometimes even less than that, if you have humans interrupting humans. For sure. If you have negative time latency, and you can have some of the most human-like voice agents that I've seen are capable of being interrupted by humans and also capable of interrupting humans too, which makes them feel like more of a conversation.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we've made leaps in a bunch of areas. So, probably the biggest and most obvious one would be latency. So this time last year, two to three seconds of latency was pretty good. And now a second of latency is too long, maybe even half of a second of latency is too long in many cases. So that has been a massive unlock, I think, enabled by new models.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, what we're seeing with this kind of new wave of infrastructure and then application layer companies is where the AI isn't listening for one thing in particular, but it's trying to get a more holistic sense of what are you as a customer asking for. There's not just three or four or five things that can help with. It's accessing resources from the business. It's accessing resources from the internet, and it can have a much more human-like conversation with you.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe we can start with the first wave of early AI phone technology, which would be the IVR phone trees of a press one for sale, press two for customer support. This was late 90s, early 2000s. And then we moved more recently into kind of truly AI driven, but still very limited, where it was an AI, but it was listening for you to say a specific word that it could then use to trigger a very specific and set workflow or script. Like I many times, unfortunately, have had to yell like customer service.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see a lot of businesses that are already doing thousands, tens of thousands of phone calls with AI every day. But from my experience, especially if it's a short phone call, a lot of these AI voice agents are so good that you wouldn't be able to tell.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would agree. It's one thing to talk to ChatGPT via text and to have a great experience there. But it's another thing entirely to be able to talk to ChatGPT or any other LLM via voice because it's next level. Like it both has to generate what you would see in the text and then it has to sound like an actual human talking back to you. And when it accomplishes that, it's almost like an emotional feeling that puts you in a different headspace, I think, in terms of what AI is capable of. And then I think to Anisha's point, in terms of why so many consumers will encounter AI voice, it might be because they choose to. Like they'll go and talk to ChatGPT, but also I think many businesses in a great way will impose it on them because you can now use AI to replace phone calls, which is so much more efficient and cost effective for them. And so many consumers probably have already interacted with AI via voice and might not have even known it or detected it.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really interesting because I feel like now in the world of LLMs, voice is one of the most magical and engaging ways to interact with AI. But arguably, we've had these AI voice products for a while and they were disappointing and not as compelling before. And I think there's a couple reasons. Like one, the voices themselves sound robotic. And then I think the biggest thing actually is just what is behind the voice, what is the engine. So like Assyria or an Alexa, it might be connected to a basic set of integrations within the Apple ecosystem or within the Amazon ecosystem. So maybe it's pulling product information or asking a basic question, but it doesn't have a personality. It doesn't really have a brain. It's probably not connected to the internet in most cases. It's in no way like a true conversational partner in a way that people are interacting with AI voice now, like it is a human or in some ways even better than a human.”
2025-03-18 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source