Could it be that years of clunky voice assistants (Siri, if we’re naming names) trained us to lower our expectations for what conversational AI could be, or to outright retreat from voice as a workable mode of interface.

Consider how AI is portrayed in science fiction: the protagonist in “Her” or HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey” both interact with humans primarily through voice. It’s intriguing, then, that breakthroughs in conversational audio AI generally emerge not from Big Tech but from smaller, often academic teams.

Early-stage VC firm Amplify Partners shares a really engaging overview of the phenomenon in its blog post “Arming the rebels with GPUs: Gradium, Kyutai, and Audio AI“. Amplify, an investor in Gradium.

Amplify’s site is really nice. Their use of the Ivory typeface in body copy makes it very readable on mobile, even in light mode.