⏭️ Forward Deployed: Voice AI on what works in 2026
Aug 25, 2026 · 36:31
Basil Chatha hosts a fireside chat with voice-AI leaders Basia Sudol (Decagon), Varun Singh (Daily), Steven Diaz (Vapi), Tyler D'Silva (Retell AI), and Sudarshan Kamath (Smallest AI) arguing that production voice agents still run on cascaded STT→LLM→TTS pipelines, not end-to-end speech-to-speech. Varun explains why outbound calls are easier than inbound. Steven and Tyler defend cascaded for guardrails and context optimization; Sudarshan says Smallest's Hydra is multimodal but enterprises still prefer cascaded hybrids. On latency, Tyler says fillers make waits natural, Steven warns giant prompts hurt cost, and Varun suggests specialized sub-agents. They also cover multilingual TTS swapping, model choices, and open-source evals.
