Why your chatbot is often the biggest voice AI bottleneck

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Kane Simms

Voice AI is the channel everyone is chasing in 2026. The thing slowing it down most is often the chatbot you already built.

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About this episode

I’m joined by Endre Davids from Seamly to explore what really happens when businesses take an existing chatbot and move it into the voice channel.

We discuss why latency often starts deeper in the conversational platform than teams expect. Endre explains how companies can spend time optimising speech recognition and text-to-speech while the chatbot itself is responsible for much bigger delays.

The conversation gets into why voice needs a different interaction model, because people speak differently from how they type. That puts far more pressure on getting the conversation design right.

We also cover how to manage perceived latency, when it makes sense to reuse existing chatbot infrastructure and how sentiment, multimodality and customer context could shape richer voice experiences.

Endre and I keep landing on the same point. The success of voice AI depends heavily on conversation design, and voice punishes the shortcuts that chat lets you get away with.

Show notes

Learn more about Seamly

Conversational Conference 2026

Guest

Endre Davids

CEO at Seamly

Endre helps conversational platforms and system integrators add voice AI agents to their product portfolio without having to build a voice solution from scratch.

Timestamps

0:00|Introducing Endre Davids from Seamly
4:46|Reusing chatbot content for voice AI
9:57|Designing voice interactions with generative AI
24:21|Minimising and managing voice AI latency
35:57|Richer voice AI with context and multimodality

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Host

Kane Simms

A strategic AI advisor who, for the past decade, has helped business leaders and product owners transform customer experience using conversational and generative AI.

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