Hi, AI: Our Thesis on AI Voice Agents

These investor pieces on emerging technology with their “thesis” and “disruption” feels so forced to me. It’s 50% talking their book, and 50% the VC version of having a tool and looking for a problem for it to solve. I’m starting to believe if the deliverable is a “thought piece”, the creators are just trying to wear the emperors clothes.

Can't believe this is already forgotten, but 2.0 wave of AI voice was Alexa, Siri, Cortana, which all became multi-billion dollar investments in timer bots

Maybe 3.0 is different but :shrug: doubt it!

> For consumers, voice agents can provide access to human-grade services without the need to pay or “match with” an actual human. Currently, this includes therapists, coaches, and companions — in the future, this is likely to encompass a much broader range of experiences built around voice. Like most other consumer software, the “winners” will be unpredictable!

So we're sacrificing the future we were promised: electronic systems communicating with electronic system with 100% certainty of interaction and some kind of specification for their behaviour, with AI models known for some % of margin of error and hallucination that interact with human-level electronic services.

I'm not saying this isn't useful, I'm just wondering: where on earth did we go wrong?!

Why do we make computers do things that humans are good at and find easy, and then offload all of the easily-mechanizable work* to humans? This truly is a horrifying reality to have wake up in. Not even the science fiction writers of the last century could have imagined that we would have fabulous computers with capabilities beyond their imagination, but through a cascade of social errors completely misapply them?!

* - in this case i am thinking mostly of office workers, who spend a lot of time transferring physical documents that were printed out, to electronic form, that workers in another office will transfer back to a physical form again. Quite a lot of work could be completely eliminated with either a punch card / barcode system, or just "the internet"

“We are transitioning from 1.0 AI voice (phone tree) → 2.0 wave of AI voice (LLM-based).”

Please give me version 0.1 back where i can press numbers and press 0 to reach a human. I never asked for 1.0 let alone 2.0