Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Shawn Wen notes that most enterprises prefer not to attach too much personality to voice agents, aiming to solve problems first, similar to Apple and Google's approach with their assistants. While some clients desire local accents or specific greetings, these were sometimes deemed too personal for initial launches, indicating a cautious approach to anthropomorphism in enterprise AI.
“But that's as far as they wanted to go because... if this personal assistant is representing a particular company brand, and it's very hard to... know how successful it would be so a lot of times that, you know, companies still try not to attach too much of a personality to it and the goal is to just make the assistant solve the solve the problem first basically”
“For example, there's this casino from South America. They like the local, very Southern American voices. They like the agent to say, Howdy, to open the conversation, for example. To be honest, in the end, they didn't launch that agent because they would be like, oh, that feels a bit too much still.”
“I think the majority of the businesses will probably hold the same position as Apple and Google, for example.”