PolyAI and Otter executives say voice AI still lacks its 'ChatGPT moment'

In an on-stage interview at the HumanX conference, reported by TechCrunch on 11 October 2026, PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen said voice AI has not had its "ChatGPT moment" yet, even with models that can listen and speak at the same time. He said the next challenge is fast reasoning so answers come quickly, and that speech recognition still misses important keywords. He also said callers should be told they are talking to an AI. Otter CMO Alex Gay said transcription accuracy is critical because every follow-up action built on a wrong transcript is also wrong, and that losing accuracy loses trust. He said Otter is working on digital twins that could represent people in meetings, and wants to notify everyone in a meeting that it is being recorded, even when the bot is not present.