Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time

0:00John Jantsch:So voice agents are moving from novelty to revenue infrastructure. This is if you stop treating them like talking FAQs and start treating them like a role. Maybe qualifier, scheduler, concierge, onboarding guide, retention rep, upsell assistant. That's what we're going to talk about today.

0:27John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Ryan Merha. He is the founder of YodelFi. YodelFi helps creators and brands stay personal at scale by letting followers call and text an AI that speaks in the creator's own voice grounded in their content library. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

0:50Ryan Murha:Hey, thanks for having me.

0:51John Jantsch:You know, I asked you how to pronounce your last name, but then did I pronounce Yodel-Fi right?

0:56Ryan Murha:Yes, it is Yodel-Fi.

0:58John Jantsch:Okay, awesome. So we're talking about voice AI. So let's kind of set the table. There's a lot, you know, there's IVRs, there's LLMs are, you know, participating chatbots. I mean, so what's a voice agent?

1:13Ryan Murha:yeah so a voice agent or i mean most agents are just interacting with an llm um a voice agent is essentially just an llm that knows it's supposed to respond in a way that's like naturally speaking and then you use another tool to have it actually read that text out loud as it's coming

1:36John Jantsch:so so typically like if i had a library if i wanted somebody to be able to answer questions about my business or my service. I would just give it everything I could and then hope when somebody asked a question, it would access the right thing in giving a response. Is that as simple as it comes?

1:54Ryan Murha:I mean, essentially that's what it is. You want to build a knowledge base, but there's kind of two components to it. So one is, let's say, all of the episodes that you've ever done and we could take all that text and we could feed that to the LLM that it could use for context. but the other piece is that we also have to make the agent feel like you and act like you in different in different points that you interact so you mean literally you like it would sound like

2:24John Jantsch:they were talking to john james well yeah so yeah we do also clone the voice so we could take a lot

2:30Ryan Murha:of your audio and use that to clone your voice but the thing that we've been finding is that a lot of people will say, here's a prompt. Hey, you're an LLM, be John Jantz, and here's all of his episodes. And they're typically getting pretty poor results with that because you as, say, a podcast host, you have a lot of different states. Sometimes you may be, I don't know, explaining something, and sometimes you may be asking a question or pushing back on something. And so what we try to do is we try to have a few different LLMs that an agent can call on and can be different versions of you and have different access to pieces of knowledge that you may need at a certain time.

3:16Ryan Murha:So that way, it sounds like you, it feels like you, it responds like you.

3:21John Jantsch:And would it be as simple to say, you know, when I hear you describe that, I'm like, oh, this is when John's feeling kind of sad. this is when John's having a really good day and happy or is it really more this is John in his sales hat and this is John in his customer service hat

3:37Ryan Murha:yeah exactly it's going to be the latter and that's what's going to make it feel like you're actually speaking to a person compared to just the LLM because what a lot of people are used to is speaking with LLM like over a chat window chat GPT or something like that and that hides a lot of the sort of mistakes but when you start talking with it you realize you know

4:04John Jantsch:very quickly yeah yeah it butchers my name you know for example um but uh might as well yeah and i think so where do you think we are in the world today are you know at one point you know people were like i hate those things or gosh i'm talking to a robot and you know that but i've i I get the sense that now as more and more, well, first off, as the technology's gotten better, but as more and more people have had good experiences, do you feel like the acceptance to where it's like, I know I'm talking to AI and I don't care?

4:38Ryan Murha:Yeah, I think people, I mean, I really think like 2026, 2027 are going to be the years of like real voice agents. I think people have been interacting in these chat functions for a while now, and they're going to want to start having a more real experience. and kind of like I was describing how we build these agents, it's going to have to be a little bit more tailored to the experience of the users looking for. I guess where we're at in it, I think we're still actually quite early. You know, a lot of people are not even using any voice agent, for example. Yeah.

5:18John Jantsch:So one of the things that I think I picked this up from off of your website, you talk about a voice agent that critically thinks how is that happening i mean again when i hear that i hear like you know they're they're actually making decisions you know they're not just they're not just accessing stuff and predicting what you want to hear

5:40Ryan Murha:yeah so so without giving away too much of the secret sauce we we use like multiple levels of LLMs, right? And within those, there's different instructions. Like one may just be orchestrating and another one may be doing an action. Another one may be, you know, calling a certain, a different LLM to give it a response. So we break up all of those tasks to be, so that way each LLM call is like very targeted. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the mistake that we're seeing a lot of businesses like fall into right now is they buy a cool ai tool it looks great in the demo and then they they get their hands on and they're like this isn't working for me it's because they're using like a very general package and the way the lms work is like if you're very specific on what you want you're going to get much better results but it can't do too much at one yeah yeah you can't

6:38John Jantsch:just brain dump the entire organization's knowledge base in there unfortunately yeah

6:43Ryan Murha:And hope it finds what you're looking for. So I'm curious about this because I have, you know, the way people are buying today is really changing, right?

6:51John Jantsch:I mean, they do a lot more research. They don't want to do a sales call. I mean, they want to get all the way to almost to the point of deciding and then have like a consultation, you know? And so I have a theory that AI agents are going to play a role in that because where people will actually offer them. Not ready to talk to a human, you know, talk to the AI voice agent. they can answer all your questions and they're not going to hard sell you. I mean, they're not going to, do you, do you feel like there, there's a point in the buyer's journey where we are, where that's actually going to be seen as a value add, as opposed to a convenience.

7:24Ryan Murha:I love that you brought this up because we are actually planning on doing this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just like when you go to a website now and you, you know, a little chat thing comes up and it's like, Hey, maybe I can answer a few questions.

7:35John Jantsch:Yeah.

7:37Ryan Murha:Yeah. The technology is there to be like, you know, take it that much further. And, The reality, especially like in software and technology, a lot of the sales and procurement process is just about making sure that you get the legal documents passed back and forth. I think that we're going to see a lot more of those roles focus on that piece. And then the answering questions and explaining the product. People don't want to be sold. You know, they just want to ask their questions. They want to get to experience it. So in some ways, like AI is kind of perfect for that.

8:11John Jantsch:Yeah. and they can hang out, right? I mean, it's like, I'm not getting the answer to anyone, I'm just going to hang up. You know, it's like, I'm not going to be rude to a person maybe, but you know, I can just hang up on this. And on top of that,

8:24Ryan Murha:you can do that at three in the morning as well, right? Like you don't have to be waiting for that call next week and they're busy or you got to go to this conference

8:32John Jantsch:and you know, it's instant. So let's talk that through. Let's, I think you also use the term purpose built. Let's walk through the framework of giving a voice agent a job description. And then maybe let's explore what the limitations are. So let's go with a typical kind of business development agent. Somebody buys a low-cost product on your website and you want to upsell them to the higher cost. Can a voice agent reach out or is that really more of a, we're going to train that person to be able to answer anybody's questions that they might have about what's next?

9:07Ryan Murha:so there's there's full tools available already that have this like full and we've experimented a lot with one of them for building some of our agents just because the functionality that they come with where they can they can already call they can lead the conversation they'll have sort of what you can like if you can imagine like a timeline and then along that timeline you have different prompts and when the agent gets to a certain like criteria it meets that it goes to the next prompt And so these tools are very cool. You can have a conversation with it and feel like you're speaking with a person.

9:42And you can get very advanced with it.

9:45Ryan Murha:It can remember your names or your ticket number or things and reuse them later and go update the database when it's done. And on top of that, you can use it a thousand times at the same second instead of just like an individual. so do do do are we at a point where people some people are feeling duped like you know

10:08John Jantsch:where it's like i thought i was talking to a human and even if they got the result they wanted it still felt you know they still felt sort of deceived i was on a call the other day and i was

10:22Ryan Murha:trying to ask the person like are you a ai agent and i think they felt offended if they because maybe they weren't, but I'm still not convinced they weren't, you know, because, but there's, there's certain tells that, you know, if you speak with these all the time, you're like, okay, there's a delay here and the accent is changing a little bit and things like that. So yeah, I think people, I think people don't want to feel that they're talking to an agent yet, but I do think that's going to change.

10:52John Jantsch:Well, do you think we're at a point where, And I'm not saying disclose it because it's an ethical thing, but just disclose it because people want to, it's a transparent thing. It's like, hey, talk to our advisor. They have all the answers for you. So, I mean, it's like right up front, even though it feels like a conversation, I know it's not. I mean, you think that's kind of the crossroads right now?

11:17Ryan Murha:I don't know. I'm one of those people that, you know, they're like, do you want to share your data? and I'm like, yes, take all my data and customize my experience and things like that. But I could imagine there's a lot of people who want to be very private. Yeah, I think that's going to be a hurdle that we have to face. And it is going to be a deciding factor of how people decide to do business with certain companies. It should at least be on the website.

11:43John Jantsch:I forgot to tell you when we booked this interview, I do need your social security number.

11:49Ryan Murha:No problem.

11:50John Jantsch:Okay. Yeah. So to walk me through, if I came to you and said, Ryan, I need this business development agent. How's the process go? What do you need from me? How do we put guardrails on it? How's the process work?

12:05Ryan Murha:yeah so we're always going to start with like a single small use case and try to like nail that down and then kind of build things on top of it we're also going to just try to like for me it's very big about matching to a brand in brand voice and making sure that it's consistent with the experience you want your users to have we build a lot more agents that are in the like where we have a big one for facilitation. So maybe it's not trying to sell you something, but you still want to experience like a full facilitator. So what that looks like is breaking down what makes a good facilitator and then building all those different pieces, putting them together, matching it to your brand and letting you use it in your company.

12:56John Jantsch:Let's just go with a really, really basic receptionist. I mean, is that a use for this or is that almost too basic?

13:04Ryan Murha:No, I think basic is good. Yeah, you could definitely, you can have an agent receive a call, quickly book an appointment with you. Kind of like what you talked about or asked about, are people going to feel kind of duped by it? I think there's a lot of scenarios where people are actually going to appreciate it more. Maybe it takes some time to get there. But I mean, if you can offer me a product at a lower cost and because I speak to an AI agent, great. Well, and I think for a lot of routine things that people want to do, I know personally things like once a year I go get contacts, you know, and I just want to be able to go on there and schedule an appointment.