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

Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen, CTO of PolyAI, tells Tim Scarfe why voice agents are harder than text agents. Voice adds time, and a good conversation depends on adapting to the person on the line, not just on reasoning to the best answer. Shawn describes an audio-native model (Dialog-RSN-1) that first predicts a turn-taking signal, then replies in text with citations, and writes the transcript last so enterprises can audit it. Along the way: training on real, noisy calls with synthetic noise added, and why over-cleaned audio made the new model worse. Latency, and what a voice agent should do while