I am reminded of OpenAI's first voice-to-voice demo a couple of years ago. I rewatched it and was shocked at how human it was; indiscernible from a real person. But the voice agent that we got sounds 20% better than Siri.

There's a hope that competition is what keeps these companies pushing to ship value to customers, but there are also billions of compute expense at stake, so there seems to be an understanding that nobody ships a product that is unsustainably competitive