Real-time voice chat with AI, no transcription
Hi HN -- voice chat with AI is very popular these days, especially with YC startups (https://twitter.com/k7agar/status/1769078697661804795). The current approaches all do a cascaded approach, with audio -> transcription -> language model -> text synthesis. This approach is easy to get started with, but requires lots of complexity and has a few glaring limitations. Most notably, transcription is slow, is lossy and any error propagates to the rest of the system, cannot capture emotional affect, is often not robust to code-switching/accents, and more. Instead, what…
Real-time voice chat with AI, no transcription launched on March 19, 2024 with 33 votes, #1,064 of 4,270 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.
In plain words
This product enables direct voice conversations with AI by feeding audio directly to a language model, bypassing traditional transcription steps. It's designed for users who want faster, more natural voice interactions without the delays and errors that come from converting speech to text first. The approach captures emotional nuance and handles accents and code-switching better than conventional cascaded systems, since the AI processes raw audio directly rather than relying on potentially lossy transcription intermediaries.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN -- voice chat with AI is very popular these days, especially with YC startups (https://twitter.com/k7agar/status/1769078697661804795). The current approaches all do a cascaded approach, with audio -> transcription -> language model -> text synthesis. This approach is easy to get started…
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