a16z's Voice AI Investment Strategy

26:11Let me circle back to that in a minute. I wanted to get a little bit deeper on the stack and the sort of balance between allowing the AI to sort of handle things and, you know, kind of put your trust and confidence in its decision making versus, you know, trying to maximize accuracy, see, which typically is going to mean more control measures and more kind of stilted or let's say less natural interactions. The stack for those that aren't familiar with this, you know, basically has been the sort of audio in, transcribe that to text, feed that into a language model, feed that, you know, response back into another text to speech model, and then send the speech back to the user, roughly speaking.

26:54You can complicate that if you want to, but you know, that pipeline basically now does actually work fast enough in many cases to be viable. But then there's the fully all multimodal model voice to voice all through one set of weights. When you said that builders are mostly still building on these more multi-part pipeline style technology stacks, is that because they're getting better results from it? Or is it because that's the only thing that is economical for their use case right now? Like what's driving that and do you see that changing? Yeah, I think the voice-to-voice models are definitely and unsurprisingly probably a little bit more expensive right now.

27:35But also I think they're just earlier. Like we, I talked to a lot of voice aging founders who have probably tried all of the models available. And I think probably Gemini Flash is maybe the best of the bunch if you're going to kind of try to do full voice-to-voice. But in general, kind of like the interruptibility is not quite there yet on those models. But as we, I think, see and say pretty much every week, like the models are the worst that they're ever going to be right now. And so I'm sure similar to how last May when we first released our voice report, like sub one second of latency was hard to imagine.

28:11And I'm sure by this time next year, like everyone is going to be using a model stack that's much sleeker and is hard for us to even imagine right now. I also think that there's, you know, reasoning models are new primitive. And I think that they're maybe being underappreciated by many, because they have the same interface as language models. But if you sort of think about it, it's like, well, there are aspects of interactions that really benefit from this probabilistic nature of the outputs of language models, all the friendship, negotiation, etc, that you have in a business conversation, even.

28:44And then there are things that really do not benefit from that, where you want high degrees of accuracy, like a negotiation, like one price is definitively better than another for one of the parties and the counterparties. So in that case, you can sort of orchestrate reasoning models and language models to handle the right parts of the conversation to get the sort of desired output. So I think you have less of this, less of the issues around aspects of the conversation that demand accuracy and the models not being well suited to that. I think the other broad philosophical point, Mark has mentioned this a lot, is the bar be as good as humans or is the bar be perfect?

29:20If the bar is to be perfect, all these technologies are not there and maybe never will be. If the bar is to outperform humans, I think we're actually there in many ways. Yeah, it's all happening very fast. How is the tool use? Because that's one other thing that I could sort of see being a challenge, although I could see it cutting either way. But depending on especially like how idiosyncratic or esoteric your tool use context is, for example, if you're doing like, you know, calls into some obscure freight management system, you might need to have potentially even the ability to like fine tune that model to get those calls to work quite right.

30:04So I guess, broadly speaking, how big of a deal is the sort of back-end interaction of tool use and what's working or not working there today from what you've seen? It's a good question. I mean, I think what we're broadly seeing is that you've got to build a lot more product than just the voice capability. I think the voice capability alone is insufficient. And, you know, there may be more sort of room to explore voice only in areas like agents where there's different types of conversations and, you know, there's different outputs that you want and there's different considerations around sort of price point and, you know, what APIs you want to consume for what fidelity of output.

30:42But even then, there's an enormous amount of integrations and workflows that you probably have to deliver to build a traditional moat. So, you know, without commenting on a specific use case in something like Freight, our general observation is that, like, the capability gets you in the conversation, but isn't sufficient to get you to the other side. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, especially when you think about a lot of these companies that voice agents are selling into are very much traditional enterprises. Like, they're not, you know, the Apples, the Googles of the world. And so for them to build or launch on a more, you know, more horizontal way, or even to try to kind of build a voice agent themselves, like, in many ways, it's a miracle if they can do it once, let alone kind of keep it updated as the models get better, as you know, there's new options that are going to be a better experience for the customer when the integration breaks with like the kind of back end system of record, what do they do?

31:37And so I think that is why we have seen so much maybe excitement on the customer side for more vertically focused platforms that, to your point, are maybe both fine tuned for the types of conversations that these customers are having, but also have done the work to build out the long tail of integrations and also the long tail of honestly just conversation types of how do you manage kind of piecing together different tools for different types of tasks that you need to complete. yeah i always think about tyler cowen saying context is that which is scarce and that has never been more true than in the i think he said that first before the ai moment but the or the era i should say but it's never been more true and so much of what i see standing in the way between businesses that want to use ai and actual successful use is literally just assembling the context and sometimes getting the context out of their heads and onto some documented form that the AI can process.

32:37And so it's not too surprising that you would see base models, even as they are like quite powerful and, you know, extremely versatile, certainly relative to anything came that came before it, it shouldn't be too surprising that they like, don't know the intricacies of not just like the freight business in general, which they might even, but like the way you handle your freight business, that stuff is, you know, that last mile, it trips a lot of people up. Do you have any sort of observations or like synthesis of what's going on there? I honestly still kind of struggle. And I do like some amount of not a lot, but like enough kind of hands-on consulting with businesses that I've seen this repeatedly, where it seems like people have a really hard time assembling the content.

33:22I mean, maybe this is what the verticalized startups are going to solve for us, but do you have a sense for what's going on there? Because it seems like it should be easier, we should be making faster progress in AI adoption than I feel like we're actually seeing. Yeah, it's funny. I think we've seen definitely an explosion of kind of AI budgets within enterprises and within end customers. And in some cases, this was especially true six months ago. It's less true now, which I think is good, but it's like, they're kind of looking for things to buy because to your point, they're not spending all day around kind of what's the latest in AI.

33:55And so they're not exactly sure how to use it in their day to day. I think we even saw this with ChatGPT where launched massive splash, fastest product ever to 100 million users. But then people weren't really sure how to use it every day. And the usage was flat for basically a year. And only now in the past year is there's more models and more obvious things to do with it. Has the usage kind of picked back up? So I think it's exactly to that point where on both the consumer side and the business side, Like if people don't know what to do with the product and if it's more than kind of a few steps to get up and running, like there's going to be a decreasing funnel, unfortunately, of people who make it through and are actually becoming paying customers.

34:34And so that's part of the reason that I think that we're seeing companies that are so vertically focused see like the most success here. Totally. And actually, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of growth these voice AI companies are seeing, like especially on the agent side, but also on the scribe side. The businesses either don't know how to use it or do know how to use it, and it's growing explosively within these businesses. Because for the businesses that can kind of embrace it, it's such a conceptual, straightforward substitution for the humans that make the phone calls. And of course, they need to think then, okay, we're going to hold it to some sort of a CSAT score, and we're going to measure outcomes on things like negotiations.

35:13So of course, there's guardrails, there's integrations that need to be done. But, you know, in the cases where it's working, it's really, really working. And, you know, we're seeing some of the fastest growing B2B startups we've seen in 10 years. Perfect to you up for a little lightning round on like what's really working across different corners of the economy. I was going to start with enterprise, actually. So you mentioned scribes. It seems like that's a pretty well established use case at this point. We're starting to see that like bleed over into like real time coaching on calls. And then obviously like full on, you know, agent substitution.

35:50Is the real time coaching working? What do we know about that? And then is the substitution actually happening to the point where you think we'll see like labor market statistic effects this year? Or do you think this will continue to be sort of isolated like examples that are the exception rather than the norm for a while still? Yeah, these are great questions. I would say that coaching is definitely working and it is an interesting transition point in that there are some jobs, for example, a call center job where if you're an AI product that is selling a coach into call center workers, there's a massive amount of demand for that right now.

36:25But what we might imagine that in, I don't know, five years or probably less, the AI agent is going to kind of replace a lot of those workers. I think where the coaching will really continue to exist is these jobs that have kind of a heavy in real life component or heavy kind of personal component. We've seen quite a few AI real time coaches for salespeople, for example, for HVAC technicians. Many of these jobs, like whether or not you get the$10 ,000 upsell comes down to the nuance of what you say or the question that you ask. So even if you're paying hundreds of dollars a month as an individual user for an AI coach there, it's absolutely worth it.

37:05In terms of like the, I guess, the economic impact of the voice agents, I think, to be honest, like there are some cases, a basic call center, for example, where an AI kind of taking the calls will free up like human workers to do honestly much better and more rewarding jobs. These are massively high turnover, 300 percent per year, like thankless jobs in many cases. And I think that like there's better things for people to be doing. And then in other cases, like recruiting is one example, we've seen quite a few voice agents that conduct initial screening calls for human recruiters. And that means that they can spend those 20 extra hours a week with the five candidates that they're really excited about and kind of catering to them and really convincing them to engage in the process and take the job.

37:55So in many cases, I think we see it as amplifying the humans in their current roles versus like replacing them. Yeah, I think all that is exactly right. You know, potentially more humans sort of move up the stack to do higher value work. I think the other thing is that you could take a look at what's happening and say at the limit, you know, we have 20 % less jobs, or you could say at the limit, we all work four days a week, and we're paid to be optimists. But like, I believe that there's an opportunity for people to be more specialized and do more of the work that matters and less of the administrative overhead stuff that seems to consume most of our day to day.

38:35Yeah, I'm with that. I guess what I'm trying to really zero in on though is like,

38:43you know, cause I think it's, it's, it's true in some ways what you're saying, but then there's other ways in which I think like, you know, retraining and, you know, reskilling and like everybody was going to become a programmer and like that really hasn't happened. And I think when we look at sort of call centers specifically and the people that work there, like we may free up resources and the company may grow and invest in other ways. But I think in many cases, like the people that have the call center jobs are not going to be like moved into other jobs at that same company. And instead, like the AI is going to just do that job and they'll just have like a much lower headcount in the call center operation.

39:20They may, you know, they may reinvest, there may be more R and D, there could be all sorts of great things. And by Che, I also think people should work less and, you know, a sort of, you know, new social contract that embraces that is like high on my list of things people should be developing now. But kind of leaving aside, like the second order effects of what happens, like, yeah, do you think we are just like at a point technologically where we could see if enterprises wanted to do it, a like 90 % head count reduction in call centers? I mean, I don't think so. We'll see, right? So far, we're not seeing it because as Olivia said, nobody's job at the call center is to just do initial phone screens.

39:56People have recruiting jobs, which involve initial phone screens that are annoying and can be overwhelming, as well as deeper interviews, as well as salary negotiations, as well as ensuring that employees are successful once they onboard. So yes, the AI is going after the initial phone screen, but we haven't seen a reduction in headcount because all of the other work is so important. And frankly, in many cases, they don't yet trust the AI to do the work or the AI can't do the work. You know, the AI can't take your employee to a baseball game a month after they've started and make sure they're having a fantastic experience.

40:30So I totally understand the conceptual argument. It's just not something we've seen yet. I think we'll also see kind of the success of AI open up probably like a new type of job that we haven't imagined before for humans to do. Like one great example is one of the, I think, fastest growing jobs right now is basically like contributing training data and doing online tasks and other things that help the AI, which might be actually similarly paid, but like a much better lifestyle than a call setter job in many ways. And so it'll be interesting to see like what new types of opportunities open up for humans in the AI era.

41:05Certainly the AIs are less abusive than the human callers. I think we can safely. Yes, for sure. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, to be clear on my perspective on this, I'm not anti-displacement or trying to still fear about that. I think we probably are going to see it and should get ready for it. Ideally, it would be a good thing. I often ask people outside of Silicon Valley bubble, and I live in Detroit, Michigan, if you didn't have to work the job you have to make the money that you need for the rest of your life, would you still work the job? The overwhelming answer is no. I consider myself very fortunate that I would probably continue to do what I'm doing, even if I weren't getting paid for it or didn't need to get paid for it.

41:46But I think it is really important for the sort of Silicon Valley set to kind of keep in mind that like, most jobs are not jobs that people are like doing for the joy of the job. And if they could have their needs met in other ways, like if they would happily, happily take that trade. So I'm not like a job preserver, but I'm just trying to figure out like, at what point is this wave of disruption actually going to hit? Like how much time do we have to sort of get ready for it? And it seems like the call center thing, if I'm understanding your answer correctly, it's like probably at least another year before we would see a sort of the, and I wouldn't necessarily, of course, these things are not binary either, but I put that 90 % number out there just to sort of say like order of magnitude effect, even if it doesn't go to zero humans in the call center, you know, it sounds like you think that's like a, at least a 2026 plus phenomenon.

42:35Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think that it is, it's cold to tell everybody, Hey, just go learn programming. So that's not what I'm here saying at all. I just, I think it's very hard to understand what the labor impact of these technologies will be. And I think it's easy to sort of hypothesize about a world in which all the jobs just go away, but it's not what we're seeing yet. So even if the technology is 18 months away, I don't know that the labor market will change in the way that we're perhaps imagining as a result of the technology. I think we'll have to see. You know, I think a broad question, though, that you're speaking to is, what does it mean for our society when we have all this abundance?

43:13And is there kind of a lack of purpose? I have a big theory that kind of people need purpose. And if they don't have enough of it, they create it. And sometimes, you know, it gets pointed in bad directions. That's a lot of why I think Google ends up not working culturally. I mean, I think there's a lot of brilliant people there, but in a sense, it's sort of a low stakes environment from a purpose perspective because the business is almost too good. And I do get nervous about mirroring that in society. So I think an almost more interesting question to me is, hey, in a world where we actually just do have all of this abundance, how do we sort of think about ensuring that people have purpose versus ensuring that people have jobs and income and all those other necessities?

43:53yeah i'm a little more maybe even optimistic on that dimension but it certainly yeah i filed that under a good problem to have okay so this is supposed to be the lightning round so let's keep going because i like opposite of lightning and rolling thunder or something but we'll go through these next ones faster so smbs you got the call answering that seems pretty straightforward any like highlights or you know for smb owners out there like where should they go to potentially get the best of the AI call answers today. Yeah, I would say something we've been very excited about for SMBs is that even for SMBs, there's a vertical solution depending on what you're doing.

44:31So if you're a restaurant operator, if you're a spa, if you're home services, we'll send our market map. We put these all in their market map, but there is a solution catered to you, which is fantastic. This actually gets back to what we were talking about before, which is like SMBs typically have one or two people doing nothing but answering phone calls, which is incredibly expensive for a small business. And when we talk to the SMB customers, when they switch over to a voice agent, they are not laying off that human who is usually like a core part of their business. But that person is now able to spend their time doing things that are like much better for the customer experience or growing the business further or other kind of extensions of the business, which are really powerful and exciting.

45:15Okay. How about creators? This one is maybe a little less interactive, although maybe you're seeing interactive experiences that are sort of creator economy. But one question I had, because I might actually do a episode powered by AI voice in the not too distant future, who has the best voice design today? If I want to create somebody that's going to give me that sort of film noir kind of read, where should I go for that sort of thing? I mean, I think there's different answers to this question. Like one, you know, there's platforms like 11 where you can clone your voice. 11 also has a great tool where you can kind of like describe a voice, describe a sound, have it created.

45:50The other end of the creator part of AI voice to me is these like digital clones, which we're seeing more and more of platforms like Delphi, where you can essentially launch a version of yourself that your audience can interact with in your voice or maybe via text or via other modalities, which is fascinating. I haven't seen AI replacing full podcast episodes for any podcasters yet. I think hypothetically we could get there where maybe you just like prompt the questions that you would ask. But we're probably still a couple years away from that. It's worth playing with Hey Jen, captions, a bunch of these other products.

46:26So just, you know, you can fine tune a model of yourself, video and audio, and then giving it a script. Because I think there is a world in which you do this entire podcast without ever owning a video camera or microphone. We did an episode with Hey Jen, actually. And for some reason, Josh's audio wasn't great. And so we then redid the entire his side of the conversation with his avatar from Hey Jen. It's been running like six months. So it was pretty good. I mean, it was not quite as good as the original would have been. but it was fitting that it happened on that episode. How about for kids?

47:02I've been playing classic Nintendo games with my kids recently, and I put advanced voice mode on often playing Mario 64, the old like open world game, because I don't know where to go. Like, where's the star? What do I have to do? So I'll ask advanced voice mode. Like, all right, this is the level I'm playing. Where do I go? And my kids are now to the point where they're like, daddy, ask AI anytime. But either I'm slow to do something or don't know what to do. So daddy, ask AI. So that's cool. I would love to have something interactive, educational for my kids, but I'm also like, yikes, I don't necessarily want to trust anyone to implement AI effectively for my kids.

47:38So any winners, any early winners in that space? I mean, I think we've talked a lot about this as a team. An area of exploration we're fascinated by is just all this stuff around kind of behavioral, social, emotional for kids. So I think that is an area where AI is very naturally suited to deliver value. and there's just not a lot of technology there. So a great example is my son loves to play Minecraft, but all of the other people he meets online are like toxic teenagers. So why isn't there a companion that can sort of play Minecraft with him and model positive social behavior? Another example is just observing the classroom.

48:18If your child goes to one of those great schools where they've got two teachers in every classroom, one sort of doing all the academic components, one doing all of the social emotional components, you already benefit from this, but a lot of kids don't go to schools like that. So having, you know, a vision model, a multimodal model that can observe the children interacting and give feedback to parents and teachers. So I think there's a ton, of course, there's, you know, assignment generation and quiz generation and, you know, helping kids learn in whatever ways is best suited to them. That stuff will happen and it will be super important, but I think pairing it with all the kind of emotional opportunities is where we get most excited.

48:54Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like we've seen companies like, you know, Synthesis and LO and Super Teacher that are kind of like, what if every kid had a reading tutor, a math tutor that was sitting next to them all day and could kind of understand how they learn best and cater to them. And then on maybe the other end of the spectrum, we've seen things like the Curio toys, which is like, what if maybe even more importantly than the tutor use cases for many kids, like what if they had just a friend, a mentor, you know, a coach that was kind of with them every day and could both like track their progress.

49:26and help get them on the right track or even just be like a completely sympathetic listening ear. Mm-hmm. I mean, this is as a side note. Sorry, I know we're in lightning round. The companion stuff is so cool. And it still feels, of course, there's so many amazing companies like Character and many others and a bunch around the top 100, top 50. But it just feels like we're in the first inning, maybe, or the warmup or something of exploring this space because there's so many contextual opportunities to do it. And look, I think one aspect of it may be completely sympathetic. Another aspect of companions might be not that sympathetic, you know, one that really challenges you and pushes you and disagrees with you.

50:05So even something as simple as that, we always joke and call it East Coast mode, like a companion that's like a little more terse doesn't exist. Why doesn't it? I don't know. And I think we're going to get to see those products in the next two years. Yeah, that's really interesting. All right. In the interest of time, we'll skip over legal and medical and maybe I can just ask for a word to Munjal from Hippocratic because I would love to talk to him about what he's doing in the medical space. But how about just kind of you mentioned companionship. Maybe the last one in the lightning round is just kind of, you know, it seems like the farthest out edge right now of this is like going beyond companionship and into relationship and even like not safe for work type of things.

50:48I don't know if that's stuff that you guys would touch in investment terms, but I trust that you're at least scouting that territory somewhat. What do you see going on on the far fringes of romance with AIs today? I mean, it's a good question. I think the thing that is surprising, everybody maybe, or at least I had an assumption that most of the companion use cases would be frisky young dudes. and it actually hasn't been that. A lot of it has been an audience that caters a lot more to women and probably feels more like interactive fiction than it does what you might consider pornography. So one, I think that there's a lot of mistaken assumptions that even I had about how the products would be used and who they're going to be used by.

51:36I also think that there's a lot of definitions of romance and I think that people are sort of perhaps critiquing these products like saying that they're a substitute for traditional romance, when in fact may make us so much more capable because you've either got somebody, you know, an AI that helps you train to be better at things like conversation and even flirting, you know, or an AI that can just be a vent for a lot of the frustration and, you know, emotional weight that people can sometimes bring to their in-person relationships. So those are some of the more surprising things. I don't know.

52:07What do you think, Olivia? No, no, I agree. I think one of the, it's funny when we, whenever we pull the top 50 top 100 list of ai apps like and send it around to our team like every time without fail people are like oh my gosh there's a ton of companion platforms on here and a lot of them are maybe more nsfw oriented but i think it's been exactly what anisha said in that it's actually much more of the ai boyfriend than the ai girlfriend use case interestingly and then a lot more like interactive fan fiction maybe than anything else but that's a part of the human experience, right? Like sexuality is a part of the human experience and we, you know, we can't pretend it doesn't exist.

52:44And when we do, you end up as Apple who can't release a product for five years. So I think that we have to, you know, we just, we have to embrace that that is going to be a part of these products and just, you know, find ways to, to get behind that. And of course, there's always going to be products at the fringes that we'll never invest in. And perhaps most people will never use, but those are almost the least interesting products to talk about because it's always been that way. Yeah, I've done two episodes actually with Eugenia from Replica. And the recent one was reviewing some research that folks at Stanford did that showed that not only did Replica reduce suicidal ideation in a substantial way for people that had that issue coming in, but also that for more often than not, it helped people get out into the world, questioned some of the data, some of it self-reported, whatever.

53:34But people indicated that they felt that using Replica was not holding them back, but in fact encouraging them to get out into the real world. So I think it was quite interesting. She's amazing. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I think, as with all technology, but maybe even more so with AI, it feels to me like the shape and the specifics of the shape of exactly what we build is going to be really important. I have no doubt that you could make a predatory romantic AI that is like, you know, addictive and exploitative in all sorts of ways. But I think we do see at least some existence proof so you can make like really positive or at least like, you know, predominantly a majority positive versions of these things.

54:16And that brings me to a question on just kind of rules of the road. I know that, you know, it is early in this space. One rule that's been proposed is like, hey, I must disclose it's AI. That's a Yuval Noah Harari one that I like for its simplicity. I've also been thinking about the idea recently of a do not clone registry, which would be sort of the modern version of like, do not call. Like you could go and say, here's my likeness and my voice. Like, don't clone me other AI platforms. You know, I'm wondering if you guys have any ideas for what either emerging best practices are or possible like, you know, regulations that might keep all of this, you know, on the good side as much as possible for us.

54:57Yeah. I mean, it's definitely early, but at least on my side, I've been surprised maybe by, it seems like more people these days are frustrated by, especially the large model companies taking the approach of we're not going to let you do something versus people being frustrated that like I'm being deep faked or I'm being cloned. Like that's not really happening to the average consumer right now. I think we've seen both the biggest startups and the biggest model companies be extremely careful about allowing you to even do anything related to a public figure, let alone like like, you know, personal pictures or other things like that.

55:31And so I think I personally am very intrigued by the idea of kind of the directory or the registry, especially because it opens up this opportunity for people of licensing or allowing their identity to be used for use cases that they are excited about. Like we're seeing platforms like Eleven Labs, they have these kind of, you know, iconic voice collections of celebrities or people who will allow their voices to be used. But it's also been a massive boon to this industry of voiceover artists that maybe historically couldn't get like a job in Hollywood. And now there's all of these voiceover jobs on 11 labs.

56:07And we could see something similar in kind of the influencer or creator economy, where if you're an influencer with, I don't know, 5 ,000 followers, you're going to have a hard time to get a big brand to respond to you. But if the AI avatar version of yourself is even better and more powerful and more extensible, then maybe you actually can get some of those big deal. So I'm really interested to see how people can kind of extend themselves using AI tools versus I at least have seen less maybe to be concerned about the everyday person who isn't a public figure getting, you know, deep faked or anything like that.

56:42I totally agree. I think every time there's a new technology, the kind of, you know, the talking heads try to get overly paternalistic. And I just don't think that's a generous enough view of the average consumer, how smart they are, how media literate they are. Of course, every technology has the potential for misuses. So I'm not being glib about that. But I do think, you know, the paternalism is, is unwelcome and often unnecessary because people, you know, learned, you know, for 30, 40 years that just because it's written a book, it's not true. And just because it's on the internet, it's not true.

57:15And just because it's on social media, it's not true. There's no reason that this technology will be any different. And, you know, whatever we do here, I hope that we're sort of generous in our assumption that consumers are smart and savvy and will know how to use the products and technologies with like the appropriate level of caution. Maybe just give me your like sort of medium or long-term vision for where this voice enabled computing is going to go. Like, is it going to be her? We're all walking around with the AI in our earpiece and we're untethered from our devices. Maybe we got glasses that pair with that.

57:48Like what's the sort of, you know, tech optimist view of life in this voice-enabled computing future? I think that we will see voice unlocked as a kind of modality feature on every product, in every interaction, in kind of every device. So, you know, AirPods, glasses, your computer. As we've dove into voice, especially from a consumer use case, you find that there's a lot of situations where maybe you don't actually want to be having a two-way conversation or you can't be having a two-way conversation. You want it to be transcribing what you say or vice versa. You can't talk and you want it to be talking back to you.

58:30And so I think right now we're in the inning one of AI voice where we have kind of a set of really compelling and exciting products, but five years from now, they're going to look incredibly limited based on what we have then where you can interact with voice in any way at any time for whatever is like most useful and helpful to you.

58:52You know, Steve Jobs famously said that a computer is a bicycle for your mind. And that meant that computer, you know, extended us intellectually in ways that were unimaginable. And that's what technology has done for us for 40 years. I think we're now going to have the emotional version of that sort of emotional bicycle where it extends us emotionally through products like Companionship, but many, many more. And I think voice is going to be the kind of primary catalyst and interface to that. So maybe a subject for our next conversation, but I think that's really the way it's going to impact us.

59:26And it's been a bit underestimated. Cool. I love it. Olivia Moore and Anisha Charya from A16Z. Thank you both. I'm part of the Cognitive Revolution. Thank you. Turpentine VC is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen and Econ 102. too. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store or rate us on Spotify.