Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Shawn Wen predicts voice agent development will branch into distinct consumer and enterprise domains, each with different requirements. Consumer voice will focus on entertainment and daily use, while enterprise voice will target customer support, professional use cases, and internal productivity. He also anticipates a surge in voice-enabled IoT devices, enhancing the natural modality of human-device interaction.
“The voice channel that require for consumer and enterprises are very different One requires a lot more professional, a lot more like, you know, regulatory or auditable The other one is really about fun because conversation is also supposed to have fun sometimes. So I think there should be these two different branches coming out.”
“And then we will see There are more hardware devices to be able to carry these voice agents, because the voice is a natural modality for these IoT devices. We probably have seen a second wave of IoT coming along.”
“the voice agent needs to be increasingly more end-to-end. And in that end-to-end, I mean, number one, turn-taking must be end-to-end and collapse into the entire pipeline, because that is the single most annoying bit when it comes to engineering and the most difficult bit to actually get it right when it comes to engineering.”