Alexander Smola
The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)
From Voice Agents to AI Avatars with Alexander Smola
- Published
- September 17, 2026
- Duration
- 1h 4m
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Sep 20, 2026
Discusses inference.
Summary
Voice AI has gotten remarkably good, but natural conversation remains a high bar. Small delays, awkward interruptions, or the wrong tone can quickly break the illusion—and adding vision and visual presence only raises the stakes. In this episode, Alex Smola, co-founder and CEO of Boson AI, explores the path from today’s voice agents to audiovisual agents …
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Show notes
Voice AI has gotten remarkably good, but natural conversation remains a high bar. Small delays, awkward interruptions, or the wrong tone can quickly break the illusion—and adding vision and visual presence only raises the stakes. In this episode, Alex Smola, co-founder and CEO of Boson AI, explores the path from today’s voice agents to audiovisual agents and AI avatars. We discuss the technical tradeoffs behind real-time voice, including audio tokenization, latency, model size, and inference cos
Themes
- inference