Voice is supposed to be the easy interface. No menus. No forms. No training session. A user speaks, the agent understands, and some neat piece of software magic happens in the background. That is the sales pitch. It is also mostly true in a demo room, which is a place where microphones behave, users speak politely, and nobody’s child interrupts from the back seat. ...
A voice assistant can transcribe your question correctly and still answer like it heard something else. That is the awkward part of modern audio-language models. The obvious diagnosis is usually “better speech recognition.” The less obvious diagnosis is nastier: the model may receive an audio input that is semantically equivalent to the text prompt, but once generation begins, its audio-conditioned reasoning trajectory drifts away from the reasoning trajectory it would have followed if the same question had been typed. ...