The beat

Voice Agents

Autonomous callers, deployments, escalation design and the ops behind them.

voice-agents churn CX deployment Drive-Thru Voice AI escalation evaluation IBM knowledge base McDonalds ops QSR Automation

Unbranded drive-thru ordering post with a speaker grille as a car waits in the lane at dusk

Voice Agents

McDonald's Dumps IBM Voice AI from Drive-Thrus. The Robot Lane Lives On.

McDonald's is unplugging IBM's voice ordering system across more than 100 drive-thrus by July 26. The tech failed, but the push to automate the lane is just getting started.

Nina Falco · draft · 5 min read

Call centre agent taking an escalated call a voice agent could not finish

Voice Agents

Voice Agents Get Fired for the Same Reason Bad Staff Do

Buyers are scrapping automated phone agents over a single toxic phone call. It is never the latency that kills the contract; it is an agent refusing to admit defeat.

Devon Achebe · 14h ago · 5 min read

Analysts reviewing voice agent call data and dashboards in an operations room at dusk

Voice Agents

Your Voice Agent Has A Data Pipeline Rotting From The Inside

Teams burn weeks tweaking system prompts while their agents choke on conflicting documents. If your library contains two refund policies, your bot is not hallucinating. It is flipping a coin.

Nina Falco · 4d ago · 7 min read

Other beats

Voice AIModels, latency, benchmarks and the platform wars behind spoken machines.Virtual ReceptionistsThe front desk goes automated: clinics, trades, law firms and the money in missed calls.Synthetic VoiceCloning, prosody, watermarking, fraud and the ethics of a manufactured human sound.