What happened to all the Voice AI wave?

Question

Similar to LLMs, there was a huge wave (noise?) towards a lot of projects and companies automating the voice calling, building TTS, voice cloning, voice fraud detection, etc. etc. For every use-case there were 10+ players. I remember there were over 20 (or 30?) YC voice companies in different verticals. Fast forward to over 6 months now, I'm yet to receive any such phone calls. My interactions (+my circle & immediate network) still happen the same way they used to happen last year. I haven't changed my consumer habits so much. I still take flights. I still book hotels, AirBnBs etc. I still go to doctor & hospitals. But I'm yet to receive any experience involving voice AI.What are your experiences in this domain? Were you trying to building something in this? Was anyone in your circle trying to solve use-cases in this domain? What were the learnings and experiences?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

I remember having a lot of fun developing IVR applications with TellMe circa 2000, such as publishing the RSS feed of my blog to an 800 number.
Back then we were using POTS with a touch-tone dial and that's what it meant to make a "phone" powered application.
I think today most brands really want to get their app on your smartphone so they are less excited to develop IVR and more interested in developing mobile apps. Also the "phone" part of mobile phones is a pale shadow of what a "phone" was in the wired age: could you really expect to wait on hold on your mobile for 30 min and not get hung up? how's the sound quality? what if the person is in a noisy background?