Sesame

Voice AI: when is the "Her" moment? — Neil Zeghidour, CEO, Gradium AI

May 9, 2026 · 19:27

Neil Zeghidour, CEO of Gradium AI, argues that voice AI remains far from the 'Her' ideal because cascaded systems (speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech) suffer from high latency—tool calls alone add 500ms to 4 seconds—while human response time is ~200ms. Speech-to-speech models reduce latency but are half-duplex, meaning they cannot handle overlapping speech or backchanneling, unlike Moshi, Gradium's full-duplex model. However, Moshi lacked intelligence, tool calls, and paralinguistic understanding—the ability to infer tone, hesitation, or discomfort from voice, which is stripped away in text. Cost is another barrier: TTS bills burn through fundraising before user bases grow. Gradium's solution is Phonon, an on-device TTS model running on smartphone CPUs, offering privacy and eliminating API fees. The path forward requires combining full-duplex natural conversation with the reliability and smarts of cascaded systems.

Pipecat Cloud: Enterprise Voice Agents Built On Open Source - Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Daily

Jul 31, 2025 · 26:46

Kwindla Hultman Kramer, co-founder of Daily, introduces Pipecat, an open-source, vendor-neutral framework for building voice AI agents, and Pipecat Cloud, a deployment layer optimized for real-time voice. He argues that achieving sub-800-millisecond voice-to-voice response times is critical and that frameworks like Pipecat handle hard problems like turn detection, interruption handling, and context management. Kramer explains that Pipecat supports 60+ models and services, including Gemini and OpenAI, and that Gemini is often 10x cheaper for 30-minute conversations. He notes that while speech-to-speech models like Moshi and Sesame are promising for natural conversation, they currently lag in instruction-following for enterprise use cases. Kramer also addresses global latency challenges, recommending deployment close to inference servers or using open-weight models locally, and highlights Pipecat Cloud's integration with Krisp for background noise reduction and a free open-source smart turn model.