AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Language models give us the ability to create natural language, conversational, interfaces for computers. We are seeing a rapid shift among early adopters to using general language instead of traditional user interfaces for tasks like writing code and editing spreadsheets. Join the cofounders of Pipecat, Gradium, and Daily as we discuss the future of realtime voice and AI interfaces. Voice is the most efficient input mode for natural-language systems, and often the most efficient output mode, as well. But good voice interfaces require a very high degree of conversational facility, intelligence, task-specific reliability, and robustness to real-world realities like multiple speakers and background noise. There's a long history of voice interfaces in science fiction: Star Trek, Iron Man, Her. We'll use these depictions of computing possibilities as a jumping off point for talking about the ideal voice interface. How close are we to being able to build these interfaces with today's models, hardware, orchestration tooling, and UI libraries? What are the most promising research directions? What did the movies get wrong, now that we actually have experience building natural language, open-ended, voice systems?