How a Voice Agent Learns the Rhythm of Conversation — Shawn Wen

Shawn, CTO of PolyAI, explains why voice agents are harder than text agents: voice adds time, and good conversation depends on adapting to the person on the line. He describes Dialog-RSN-1, an audio-native model that predicts turn-taking, replies in text with citations, and writes the transcript last for auditability, along with training on real noisy calls, latency and what agents should do while thinking, voice personality, benchmarking, harness ownership, and the shifting bottleneck from producing content to validating it.