Boson AI CEO Alexander Smola on Voice Agents, Avatars, Latency and Emotional Intelligence
TWIML AI Podcast · rss · 2026-09-17
TWIML AI Podcast episode 777 hosts Alexander Smola, co-founder and CEO of Boson AI and CMU professor, on the path from today's voice agents to audiovisual agents and AI avatars.
- Real-time voice tradeoffs: audio tokenization, latency, model size, and inference cost are the core engineering challenges for natural conversation
- Vision raises the bar: small delays, awkward interruptions, or wrong tone break the illusion even faster when systems can both see and be seen
- Also covered: emotional intelligence in AI, learning from human interactions, and what it takes to move beyond impressive demos to genuinely natural interactions
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