Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Contrary to popular belief, voice AI is not a solved problem, according to Shawn Wen. While speech technology has become more commoditized, real-time conversation modeling remains challenging and is not yet on par with human capabilities.
“Do you think that speech tech has become commoditized or is that just completely wrong?”
“It becomes a lot more commoditized in a way, but also in a lot of different ways is still not. But modeling the real time conversation, it is still hard and it's not quite there yet.”
“People think that, you know, voice assistants are a solved problem, but it's actually much harder than people think.”