a16z on AI Voices: Call Centers, Coaches, and Companions with Olivia Moore & Anish Acharya

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm speaking with Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya, partners at Andreessen Horowitz and fellow AI scouts, who are constantly tracking emerging technologies and consumer behaviors, and who in recent months have really distinguished themselves as keen observers and eager early adopters of AI voice platforms and products. In this conversation, we review recent developments in voice AI technology, and also explore how voice AI is already starting to transform business operations, user experiences, and human-computer interaction more broadly. On the technology side, we discuss how recent multimodal models have simplified the model stack, and with it the application development process. How reduced latency and improved interrupability are enabling far more natural conversations than ever before, and how products including past guest Hume AI's Octave model, Google's interactive version of NotebookLM, and the very viral and incredibly natural sounding Sesame are all beginning to demonstrate a remarkable level of emotional intelligence, both in terms of their ability to understand the user and the expressiveness with which they can communicate back. On the impact side, we cover a bunch of really interesting real world applications and trends, including the company Happy Robot, which uses voice AI to handle complex negotiations and build rapport with truckers in the context of freight brokerage, vertical solutions for restaurants and other types of SMBs, and how business owners are often employing these systems to handle after-hours and other calls that they can't answer themselves. How enterprises are using the technology to facilitate meetings and provide real-time coaching. Why we haven't yet seen a major impact on call center jobs and how soon that might happen. Why Apple is now saying that Siri won't get a major update until 2027, even as so many other things are clearly starting to work. And of course, the ongoing rise of AI companions, for kids, for seniors, and for the lonely. Along the way, we also touch on a couple philosophical questions relating to human labor displacement and the delicate balance between protecting consumers and encouraging innovation. As someone who's been a career entrepreneur and genuinely loves using OpenAI's advanced voice mode as, among other things, a biology tutor and a real-time video game guide for me and my kids, I am super excited about this technology, but also legitimately concerned about just how scammy the world could quickly become if the models get even just a little bit more lifelike. It had been a while since my last voice AI red-teaming exercise, but with this conversation in mind, I did go back to two reasonably well-known AI calling agent platforms, to which I had previously reported flagrant vulnerabilities, and found that sadly, a year later, both still allow me to quickly clone Donald Trump's voice and scalably call anyone and say anything in that voice, all with no meaningful controls. This to me does strongly suggest that we need new rules for these sorts of products sooner rather than later, both to protect the public and to protect the AI industry from its most careless developers. As it turned out, Olivia offered a brilliant twist on my do-not-clone registry idea, which could both expand economic opportunity and protect the public from AI impersonation, and which I feel it is truly time to build.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or leave a comment on YouTube. We welcome your feedback too either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. For now, I hope you enjoy this exploration of the rapidly evolving world of AI voice interactions with Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya, consumer technology investors, AI Scouts, and partners at Andreessen Horowitz. Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya from A16Z here to talk about the future of AI voice interactions. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Anish Acharya** (3:49)
Awesome. Thanks for having us.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:52)
I'm excited. So let's see. First thing I wanted to say was just you guys are part of a group that I affectionately refer to as AI Scouts, people who are out there on the edges of what exists and kind of exploring it in, I think, a lot of different ways. So before we get into the actual object level stuff of like what you've found and what you think is coming in the realm of voice, I'd love to just get a little bit of like maybe meta lessons or specific alpha tips for how you do such a good job of this. Where do you go for information? What's the sort of top of funnel for you? How do you know you're on to something? I think people could learn a lot from your example in that respect.