VentureBeat January 23, 2026
Despite lots of hype, “voice AI” has so far largely been a euphemism for a request-response loop. You speak, a cloud server transcribes your words, a language model thinks, and a robotic voice reads the text back. Functional, but not really conversational.
That all changed in the past week with a rapid succession of powerful, fast, and more capable voice AI model releases from Nvidia, Inworld, FlashLabs, and Alibaba’s Qwen team, combined with a massive talent acquisition and tech licensing deal by Google DeepMind and Hume AI.
Now, the industry has effectively solved the four “impossible” problems of voice computing: latency, fluidity, efficiency, and emotion.
For enterprise builders, the implications are immediate. We have moved from the era of “chatbots...
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