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Voice used to be AI’s forgotten modality - now it's having its big moment: rapid innovation, big funding rounds, major agentic applications My conversation with @neilzegh, top AI researcher in the field (@GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @kyutai_labs) and now CEO of @GradiumAI This is a reference episode on all things voice AI 🔥 00:00 Intro 01:21 Voice AI’s big moment, and why we’re still early 03:34 Why voice lagged behind text/image/video 06:06 The convergence era: transformers for every modality 07:40 Beyond Her: always-on assistants, wake words, voice-first devices 11:01 Voice vs text: where voice fits (even for coding) 12:56 Neil’s origin story: from finance to machine learning, with help from @ylecun and @soumithchintala 18:35 Neural codecs (SoundStream): compression as the unlock 22:30 Kyutai: open research, small elite teams, moving fast 31:32 Why big labs haven’t “won” voice AI4 34:01 On-device voice: where it works, why compact models matter 46:37 The last mile: real-world robustness, pronunciation, uptime 41:35 Benchmarking voice: why metrics fail, how they actually test 47:03 Cascades vs speech-to-speech: trade-offs + what’s next 54:05 Hardest frontier: noisy rooms, factories, multi-speaker chaos 1:00:50 New languages + dialects: what transfers, what doesn’t 1:02:54 Hardware & compute: why voice isn’t a 10,000-GPU game 1:07:27 What data do you need to train voice models 1:09:02 Deepfakes + privacy: why watermarking isn’t a solution 1:12:30 Voice + vision: multimodality, screen awareness, video+audio 1:14:43 Voice cloning vs voice design: where the market goes 1:16:32 Paris/Europe AI: talent density, underdog energy, what’s next

The model isn’t the moat—decision-driven UX is. We had Megh Gautam, Chief Product Officer at @crunchbase, on Future Proof to break down how they made their trusted data product AI-native. The key insight: design for decisions. Users don’t want facts; they want to know what’s worth their time—and they want your product to guide that judgment. Listen/watch here useparagon.com/podcast/how-to…

“You either need to transition your child or you don’t get to keep your child.” Attorney Erin Friday says California Child Protective Services can threaten parents who refuse to use their child’s preferred pronouns. She told me she feared calling the police when her 13 year old daughter ran away because she worried CPS would take her child. “My daughter, who was 13 years old, just starting high school, was secretly socially transitioned at school.” “The school started to call my daughter by a male name, use male pronouns.” “When I called the school and told them to stop, that next week Child Protective Services was at my door.” “The next day, the police.” “That was an immediate alert to me that the school wants to parent my child.” “If I didn’t follow and call my daughter a boy, Child Protective Services may come and take my child away.” “Parents in Southern California had lost custody of their children because they wouldn’t transition their daughter.” “I already had a black mark, and a few months later my daughter ran away.” “The normal thing for a parent to do is to ask law enforcement to help find your child… but I couldn’t make that phone call.” “Because Child Protective Services can swoop in anytime and take my child.” “It’s coercion at its highest level.” “You don’t get to parent your child.” “This is America. This is insane.” @erinfriday75490

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