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Talking Without Sound: The Next Frontier of AI Interaction

9 min readSep 12, 2025

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“It looks like telepathy.”

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Photo by Balint Mendlik on Unsplash

Have you heard that “voice is the ultimate interface for AI”?

Me too, but they could be only partially right.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, says:

“Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps. Intelligence is infused into all of your interactions.”

Bret Kinsella, founder and CEO of Voicebot.ai says:

“Voice is a new interface across all surfaces, so it’s device independent, which makes it different from the other platform shifts that we’ve seen.”

Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs sees voice as “the ultimate interface,” though his opinion could be biased by what his company does.

We have to admit it: voice interaction is natural, as natural as the way we humans communicate with each other. Voice interaction is almost “no interface” at all.

But it’s also true that I feel silly when talking to my computer or my phone. Am I alone in this? Is it because I belong to the baby boomer generation?

Beyond the irk of talking to a machine, there could be other reasons not to use the voice for interacting with an AI:

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Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

Written by Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

AI expert, writepreneur, and futurologist. I was in AI way before it became cool.

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