Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Shawn Wen explains that his company moved away from cascaded speech models about a year ago, anticipating that end-to-end models would be the future. He notes that while current speech-to-speech models are impressive in demos, they often fail in real-world applications like contact centers, particularly in handling interruptions and turn-taking.
“Around one year ago, we decided that cascaded is going to be outdated in the future and the end-to-end model will be the future.”
“And when we started to look into the market, the reality is that all these latest speech-to-speech models They are really good for the demos because I can show you really natural conversation. You'll be like, wow, that's singularity already. But once we deploy into the contact centers, it breaks in so many different places.”
“The interruptions sometimes is a bit too aggressive. So if you are on the phone with an old lady, And the old lady is the first time talking to the bot and she was just constantly confused and, you know, stop. And then the agent just keep, you know, speaking over her.”