From Voice Agents to AI Avatars with Alexander Smola

Voice AI has gotten remarkably good, but natural conversation remains a high bar. Small delays, awkward interruptions, or the wrong tone can quickly break the illusion, and adding vision and visual presence only raises the stakes. In this episode, Alex Smola, co-founder and CEO of Boson AI and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, explores the path from today’s voice agents to audiovisual agents and AI avatars. We discuss the technical tradeoffs behind real-time voice, including audio tokenization, latency, model size, and inference cost, as well as what changes when these systems can both see and be seen. We also explore the role of emotional intelligence in AI, how agents can learn from human interactions, and what it will take to move beyond impressive demos toward interactions that actually feel natural.