Play.ai: Conversational Voice AI, trained to speak your business

I recently wrote about the fantastic voice to text capabilities of Play.ht. One of the company's recent offerings (Play.ai) expands this capability to introduce a Conversational Voice AI agent capability.

Their introductory post cites this mission:

Our mission is to build a universal Voice Interface that every assistant, chatbot or application can integrate and be able to naturally talk to people.

So far so good.

Although voice interfaces exist, their quality and experience limit their adoption. A key reason for this is today's interfaces are built by stitching together multiple standalone components like speech recognition, text to speech and NLP or LLMs. This results in a ‘walkie-talkie’ like experience whose quality is only as good as the capabilities of the underlying components.

Yeah. The walkie-talkie experience is ... well, it's fundamentally amazing when you think how far we've come in say, 10 years. But, it's just not good. It's not good having to wait for seconds for the system to respond.

It needs to be faster. But it also needs to sound better too.

We aim to address this with a novel approach by building a single Large Dialogue Model (LDM) built on top of our state-of-the-art conversational voice models, that understands different aspects of a person’s speech and coherently responds back in the most natural form while handling perfect interruptions and turn-taking.

Here's what they're aiming for:

Play AI aims to make AI Voice technology accessible and easy to adopt. The Play AI platform enables users to build delightful and capable AI Voice Agents for personal and business use cases. Play AI API provides developers an AI Voice stack that can be integrated into any AI agent, application or device.

What's it like? How good is it?

I'd say, very good.

I tried it out.

I was just messing around – for this post – and I thought I'd give it a go. I threw on my headset and started chatting...

I didn't know they'd made the download capability until the AI explained it to me. Seriously cool.

What's your view?

Does this beat your existing implementation?

For a long of vendors, the answer is emphatically yes.

I strongly encourage you to just go and talk to it - like I did - and see what you make of it.

Hit their front page at https://play.ai/ and click the button to start chatting:

Good luck to the team at Play.ht and Play.ai. Very impressive.