Toki Sherbakov

Building Effective Voice Agents — Toki Sherbakov + Anoop Kotha, OpenAI

Jul 20, 2025 · 17:17

Toki Sherbakov and Anoop Kotha from OpenAI argue that speech-to-speech models have reached a 'good enough' tipping point for production voice agents, highlighting the shift from chained architectures (transcription + LLM + TTS) to the real-time API's speech-to-speech approach. They detail trade-offs across latency, cost, accuracy, UX, and integrations depending on use case—consumer apps prioritize low latency and expressiveness, while customer service demands accuracy and tool integration. Key design patterns include delegating complex tasks to smarter models like O4 mini, prompting for voice expressiveness and tone, and starting with few tools. For evals, they recommend starting with observability, using SMEs for labeling, then transcription-based LLM-as-judge evals, audio evals with GPT-4 Audio to assess tone and pacing, and synthetic conversations between two real-time clients. Guardrails should run async with a configurable debounce period (e.g., every 100 characters). Examples from Lemonade (early focus on evals and guardrails) and Tinder (customization for brand realism) illustrate successful approaches.

OpenAI for VP's of AI + Advice for Building Agents

Mar 5, 2025 · 16:52

OpenAI's Toki Sherbakov and Prashant Mital explain how enterprises adopt AI through a three-phase journey: building an AI-enabled workforce with ChatGPT, automating operations with APIs, and infusing AI into end products. They detail a Morgan Stanley case study where retrieval methods improved an internal knowledge assistant's accuracy from 45% to 98%. The pair define agents as models with instructions, tools, and self-terminating execution loops, then share four field lessons: build with primitives before frameworks, start with a single purpose-built agent, graduate to a network of specialized agents with handoffs for complex tasks, and keep prompt instructions simple while running guardrails in parallel using fast models like GPT-4o mini for safety and reliability.