Your Voice Agent is Just a Walkie-Talkie
Official Schedule Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 12:05pm-12:25pm
- Track/room: Claws & Personal Agents · Track 6
- Speaker(s): Neil Zeghidour
- Session type/status: session · confirmed
Official Description
Everyone says cascaded voice pipelines are dead and native speech models are the future. Yet
production environments are still dominated by STT-LLM-TTS stacks. Reconciling the natural flow of
native audio with the elite reasoning of a cascaded agent remains an unsolved systems problem. This
talk dissects the brutal technical trade-offs behind that counterintuitive reality. We will break
down why your voice agent is still stuck behaving like a walkie-talkie and map out the specific
technical roadmap required to build full-duplex AI that actually works.
Related YouTube Video
Voice AI: when is the "Her" moment? — Neil Zeghidour, CEO, Gradium AI (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).
Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.
People
Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.
Supporting Slides
- youtube P_RI1kCkRbo slides — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.
Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: youtube P_RI1kCkRbo dense slides (2 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- youtube P_RI1kCkRbo dense slides
- youtube P_RI1kCkRbo reconstructed slides
- youtube P_RI1kCkRbo slides
- Slide-derived terms:
engineering,future,braintrust,workos,openal,engineer,aiengineer,gradium,kyutai,real,raat,tdps,vastelnt,cofounder,brig,soos,google,deepmind