> I understand the Realtime API voice novelty, and the techonological achievement it is, but I don't see it from the product point of view. It looks like one of those startups finding a solution before knowing the problem.

The market for realistic voice agents is huge, but also very fragmented. Customer service is the obvious example, large companies employ tens of thousands of customer service phone agents, and a large # of those calls can be handled, at least in part, with a sufficiently smart voice agent.

Sales is another, just calling back leads and checking in on them. Voice clone the original sales agent, give the AI enough context about previous interactions, and a lot of boring legwork can be handled by AI.

Answering simple questions is another great example, restaurants get slammed with calls during their busiest hours (seriously getting ahold restaurant staff during peak hours can be literally impossible!) having an AI that can pick up the phone and answer basic questions (what's in certain dishes, what is the current wait time, what is the largest group that can be sat together, etc) is super useful.

A lot of small businesses with only a single employee can benefit from having a voice AI assistant picking up the phone and answering the easy everyday queries and then handing everything else off to the owner.

The key is that these voice AIs should be seamless, you ask your question, they answer, and you ideally don't even know it is an AI.