⏭️ Forward Deployed: Voice AI on what works in 2026
About this episode
From the show’s notesVoice agents are one of the hottest use cases in enterprise right now, but also one of the hardest to actually take live. Getting latency low enough to feel human without dumbing down the responses, making reliable tool calls to a CRM without dropping the customer mid-call, building fallback models for when your main provider goes down. None of it is as simple as the demos make it look.
Basil Chatha hosted a fireside chat with five eng leaders who deal with this stuff every day: Basia Sudol (Head of Enterprise Solutions, Decagon), Varun Singh (CPTO, Daily), Steven Diaz (FDE Manager, Vapi), Tyler D'Silva (Founding FDE, Retell AI), and Sudarshan Kamath (Founder, Smallest AI).
Read the show’s notes in full
We get into why nobody serious is shipping real-time voice-to-voice yet, why LLMs forget the middle of your prompt (and what that does to your architecture), why a giant prompt quietly destroys your unit economics, and why voice agent costs are now being compared directly against human labor.
Plus the stuff nobody warns you about: turn-taking, HIPAA constraints, why outbound is easier than inbound, why getting an exec to actually like the voice can be harder than any model problem, and more!
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Note from swyx: this is a test pilot for a new FDE oriented podcast on Latent Space - from Basil Chatha, who is our latest contributor leading our FDE coverage. The full pod is at youtube.com/watch
Let us know what you think!
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