Serving Voice AI at Scale — Arjun Desai (Cartesia) & Rohit Talluri (AWS)
Jun 27, 2025 · 17:05
Arjun Desai of Cartesia AI and AWS's Rohit Talluri discuss scaling voice AI for enterprise, arguing that latency and controllability are critical, with Cartesia's state-space model Sonic 2 achieving 40ms model latency for real-time applications. Desai explains that traditional transformer models scale quadratically, while Cartesia's SSMs maintain O(1) generation, enabling 2.5x faster inference than their earlier models. He emphasizes that edge deployment is 5x faster than cloud round-trips, making local models essential for interactive use cases. On quality, Desai notes that voice AI must handle interruptions, accents, and background noise, and that Cartesia's voice marketplace amplifies human voice actors rather than replacing them. Looking to 2030, he predicts voice AI will become the default interface across healthcare, customer support, and gaming, with interactive models extending beyond audio to full world models.
