The Hard Part of Voice AI Is Not the Voice: Engineering Voice Agents That Take Action
 Shankar Krishna |
Voice AI has crossed a threshold, and the shift changes where engineering effort should go. Systems that once only transcribed speech now answer customers, resolve disputes, and take actions across enterprise systems without a person in the loop. Yet most teams still pour their effort into the speech model, which has become a component you buy from a few providers. The real engineering, and the real risk, lives in the agent layer beneath the voice. That layer is a loop that reasons, calls tools, and acts under a hard latency budget measured in milliseconds. Drawing on years of building voice AI at enterprise scale, I will cover the anatomy of a modern voice agent. I will show where latency is spent across a single turn, and the failure modes that catch teams late, including barge in and accent drift. I will close with a practical playbook for what to own, what to buy, how to evaluate from real calls, and how to design the handoff to humans. Attendees will be able to judge where voice agents belong, and where they do not. |
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- Microsoft NERD Center, Kendall Square
- 1 Memorial Drive
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- United States 02142
- Room Number: NERD/1250, Abigail Adams
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- Co-sponsored by IEEE Boston AI Group
Speakers
Shankar Krishnan of Stripe
The Hard Part of Voice AI Is Not the Voice: Engineering Voice Agents That Take Action
Biography:
Shankar Krishnan is a product leader with more than 15 years in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He currently works on developer productivity at Stripe. Before Stripe, he led product management for conversational and voice AI within the Amazon Bedrock generative AI organization. He built several conversational AI products and voice models that are used by Fortune 500 companies. Earlier he led AI product work for autonomous vehicles at Aptiv, analytics for small and medium businesses at Upserve, and conversational AI for enterprise clients at IBM. He also co-chairs the IEEE International Conference on AI and Data Analytics, a leading AI focused conference held annually in Boston.