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A few years ago, Moin and I were driving down 280 and talking about building something in voice AI. We were excited by the future with models that could truly understand and naturally speak with us, and it felt obvious to me at the time that these models, like us, needed to take in and output audio. It turns out this is an extremely hard thing to build, but I’m so proud of the Phonic team for taking us a step closer in that direction with Phonic-1.
Few lessons I learned:
1. Intelligence cannot be traded off for low latency or naturalness: the most valuable workloads in voice are intelligence bottlenecked (multi-step tool calling, instruction following and long context understanding)
2. Real calls are the ultimate benchmark. Whenever I sit with a customer and listen to their calls, I always find new failure modes and learnings that help us build at the frontier.
3. Reliability is everything. A voice call going silent or dropping is truly an awful experience, and you can’t just retry a request (like coding agents). We had to think about our infra from the ground up for reliability.
We’re so excited to release Phonic-1. It’s a really great model across intelligence, latency and naturalness, and already making a huge impact with our customers. And so much more in store to come!
Few lessons I learned:
1. Intelligence cannot be traded off for low latency or naturalness: the most valuable workloads in voice are intelligence bottlenecked (multi-step tool calling, instruction following and long context understanding)
2. Real calls are the ultimate benchmark. Whenever I sit with a customer and listen to their calls, I always find new failure modes and learnings that help us build at the frontier.
3. Reliability is everything. A voice call going silent or dropping is truly an awful experience, and you can’t just retry a request (like coding agents). We had to think about our infra from the ground up for reliability.
We’re so excited to release Phonic-1. It’s a really great model across intelligence, latency and naturalness, and already making a huge impact with our customers. And so much more in store to come!
Introducing Phonic-1, the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks — from @phonic_co, the speech-to-speech model company.
We’ve had a breakout year and raised a $27.5M Series A led by @firstround with participation from @Lux_Capital, @felicis, and Definition.View quoted post on X
