Teaching a Computer to Speak | Voice AI in the Real World

Voice AI sounds simple until you try to deploy it at scale — across airports, accents, languages, and thousands of employees at once.

In this episode of ServiceNow Insights, host Bobby Brill sits down with Midam Kim, an ML engineer and linguist at ServiceNow, to unpack what it actually takes to build voice AI as an enterprise product. From the out-of-vocabulary problem (why AI still struggles with names) to why turn-taking in conversation is a linguistic skill most people never think about, Midam breaks down the human science behind the technology.

 In this episode:

- Why voice AI is replacing typing as the default way to interact with enterprise systems

 - The difference between building for employees (B2B) vs. building for their customers (B2B2C)

 - Why an airport is one of the hardest possible environments for voice AI — and what ServiceNow does about it

 - The "out-of-vocabulary" problem: why AI still struggles with names, accents, and rare expressions

 - Why ServiceNow's secret sauce is hiring linguists, not just engineers

 - The linguistic framework behind every voice interaction: sounds, words, and turn-taking

 - Why voice AI is like teaching a kid to speak for the first time

Chapters
00:00 — Welcome to ServiceNow Insights
00:22 — Meet Midam Kim, ML Engineer & Linguist
00:35 — Why voice is replacing typing
01:48 — What voice AI actually does for employees
03:40 — B2B vs. B2B2C: who's really using this?
05:11 — Desk employee vs. airport traveler: two different problems
06:42 — Building for an ever-changing environment
08:53 — Why airports are the hardest use case
09:54 — Accents, fluency, and the diversity problem
11:20 — "My Name Is. My Name Is. My Name Is." — the OOV problem
12:50 — The coffee shop name story
13:20 — How ServiceNow trains its models
14:59 — The 3 linguistic layers: sounds, words, interaction
16:38 — Midam's turn-taking story from Korea
18:33 — Why voice agents can't be "that person you avoid"
20:16 — "We can make it great"

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Related episode: Voice AI Agent Evaluation — how ServiceNow measures whether voice AI meets human expectations. https://youtu.be/x7Ks932T18o

For more about voice in AI from Midam Kim - https://youtu.be/3NUf6W_FMWs?is=wGc7BfyhiDp8JlOW

 #VoiceAI #EnterpriseAI #ServiceNow #ArtificialIntelligence #Linguistics #ConversationalAI #AIProduct #Podcast

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