Jessa Parette

The hidden principles of human conversation — and why every Voice AI team eventually runs into them. Think back to a conversation where you could hear, sense even, that something changed midway through. A sigh, an extra pause or a phrase spoken in a distracted voice, and suddenly you’re recalibrating, translating what is about to happen through the filter of what was just said. Sensing the change in conversation through tone or inflection is an instinct practically stamped into our DNA. ...

I was standing in the back of house during a QSR site visit, headset on, listening to the drive-thru line work. The AI was handling it cleanly. A customer pulled up to the speaker, said what they wanted — no fumbling, no repeating, no "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" The order moved through. The customer pulled forward. From where I was standing, it looked like exactly what the industry has been promising: frictionless, fast, almost elegant. Then the POS went down. What happened next...

Voice AI keeps getting smarter. It keeps sounding wrong. The problem isn’t the script — it’s the invisible layer we haven’t designed for yet. There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from sitting in a room full of smart people trying to design voice AI by feel. The engineers are capable. The dialog flows technically work. And still, something is off — the system sounds cold, or slightly robotic, or wrong in a way no one in the room can precisely name. So the conversation circles....