For enterprises, AI directly replaces human labor with technology. It’s cheaper, faster, more reliable — and often outperforms humans. Voice agents also allow businesses to be available to their customers 24/7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, or complete purchases. Customer availability and business availability no longer have to match 1:1 (ever tried to call an East Coast bank after 3 p.m. PT?); with voice agents, every business can always be online.
For consumers, we believe voice will be the first — and perhaps the primary — way people interact with AI. This interaction could take the form of an always-available companion or coach, or by democratizing services, such as language learning, that were previously inaccessible.
We are just now transitioning from the infrastructure to application layer of AI voice. As models improve, voice will become the wedge, not the product. We are excited about startups using a voice wedge to unlock a broader platform.
Some of our prior work on AI x voice: Hi, AI: Our Thesis on AI Voice Agents
Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya
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DMV AI Bot Olivia Moore See more on X
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What’s new in AI voice?
2024 was a massive year for AI voice. Since we published our last AI voice update…
Advancements in model development have streamlined the infrastructure “stack,” resulting in voice agents with lower latency and improved performance. This improvement has largely materialized in the last six months with new conversational models.
These conversational models are also becoming more affordable over time. In December 2024, OpenAI dropped the price of the GPT-4o realtime API by 60% for input (to $40/1M tokens) and 87.5% for output (to $2.50/1M tokens). GPT-4o mini is also now available via realtime.
Where are AI agents now?
YC founders building voice agents are largely concentrated in B2B- (~69%) and healthcare-focused (~18%) use cases, followed by consumer (~13%).
