About this episode

The episode explores the evolution and future of Voice AI with insights from Neil Zeghidour.

Voice used to be AI’s forgotten modality — awkward, slow, and fragile. Now it’s everywhere. In this reference episode on all things Voice AI, Matt Turck sits down with Neil Zeghidour, a top AI researcher and CEO of Gradium AI (ex-DeepMind/Google, Meta, Kyutai), to cover voice agents, speech-to-speech models, full-duplex conversation, on-device voice, and voice cloning. We unpack what actually changed under the hood — why voice is finally starting to feel natural, and why it may become the default interface for a new generation of AI assistants and devices. Neil breaks down today’s dominant “cascaded” voice stack — speech recognition into a text model, then text-to-speech back out — and why it’s popular: it’s modular and easy to customize. But he argues it has two key downsides: chaining models adds latency, and forcing everything through text strips out paralinguistic signals like tone, stress, and emotion. The next wave, he suggests, is combining cascade-like flexibility with the more natural feel of speech-to-speech and full-duplex conversation. We go deep on full-duplex interaction (ending awkward turn-taking), the hardest unsolved problems (noisy real-world environments and…

People in this episode

Host: Matt Turck

Guest: Neil Zeghidour

Topics covered

• Voice AI
• speech recognition
• full-duplex conversation
• voice cloning
• AI assistants
• natural language processing

Keywords

• Voice AI
• speech-to-speech models
• full-duplex interaction
• voice cloning
• AI interfaces
• cascaded voice stack
• latency
• paralinguistic signals

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gradium AI, DeepMind, Google, Meta, Kyutai

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