Why voice agents are about to be everywhere: Dylan Fox, CEO of AssemblyAI
Summary
AssemblyAI, through its CEO Dylan Fox, discusses the rapid adoption of conversational voice agents and the critical role of high-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. The company launched TTS-1, a proprietary model built for conversational use cases. AssemblyAI emphasizes its strategy of owning the entire 'voice loop' (Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech) and leveraging a unified inference infrastructure. This approach allows developers to build scalable, low-cost voice applications with uncapped rate limits, addressing the core need for natural, intelligent voice interactions in both B2B and consumer environments.
Key takeaways
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The Voice as a Tell
Users judge the intelligence and utility of a voice agent based on the quality of the voice. If the voice is poor, users are likely to hang up, regardless of the underlying AI capability. (0:00, 9:28)
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TTS-1 for Conversational Agents
3:56
AssemblyAI launched TTS-1, a text-to-speech model specifically trained on proprietary conversational data to ensure a natural, conversational sound, moving beyond the quality of traditional audiobooks or podcasts. (2:36)
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Infrastructure Advantage of the Full Voice Loop
By serving TTS-1 on the same proprietary inference stack used for Speech-to-Text (STT), AssemblyAI offers a significant advantage: a frontier-quality model at a low cost ($15 per 1 million characters) with uncapped rate limits and high reliability. (12:56)
Technical details
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TTS-1 Model Specifications
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TTS-1 is AssemblyAI's first TTS model, purpose-built for conversational voice agents. It is priced at $15 per 1 million characters and is claimed to be the lowest-cost frontier TTS model for voice agents, optimizing quality, cost, and latency. (2:36)
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Voice Infrastructure Scale
The platform handles over 2 billion API calls monthly and over 100 million conversations weekly. This scale necessitated building proprietary inference software and a runtime, which now powers both STT and TTS services. (12:56)
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Future Voice Capabilities
AssemblyAI is developing a live speech-to-speech duplex model, scheduled for release in early December, which will run on the same unified inference stack. (12:56)
Mentioned resources
Channel & topics
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