What did I say? What did I mean? Do you understand me? We ask each other those three questions constantly without noticing. Now we ask them of machines — and this episode is about what happens in the gap.

Host Bobby Brill pulls together conversations with the ServiceNow linguists, research engineers, and AI governance leads working on voice, language, and chat, including a real recording of a voice agent failing in real time. Same words. Different meaning. And a machine in the middle trying to work out which one you intended.

In this episode:

Why a single English word carries no meaning without context, and what that does to translation

How a name that isn't in the training data breaks the first model in the chain

The three-model cascade behind every voice agent, and what gets lost at each handoff

A voice agent that hears a confirmation code correctly three times and rejects it three times

Why formality — tu or vous — is a fluency problem, not a grammar problem

Who decides what's acceptable for an AI to say when the same word is fine in London and not in Chicago.

Check out our past episodes on voice and voice AI:

https://youtu.be/cGXCnABXKow

https://youtu.be/yxoHmZj5gOk

https://youtu.be/x7Ks932T18o

Guests:

Lyena Solomon, Director of Globalization and Accessibility

Midam Kim, Machine Learning Engineer

Tara Bogavelli, Research Engineer

Katrina Stankovic, Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Gabrielle Gauthier-Melançon, Staff Applied Research Scientist

Louis-Philippe Morin, AI Governance Product Manager

CHAPTERS

0:00 "Half ten" — same words, an hour apart

2:04 What did I say: the word "order"

3:19 The name a machine can't hear

5:23 Three models handing meaning to each other

8:19 Naming conventions 10:04 Listen: a voice agent fails

14:47 Tu or vous: talking to you correctly

16:39 Who decides what's acceptable

18:49 Teaching it the way you'd teach a kid

20:15 Why any of this matters

For more information, see:

ServiceNow Training and Certification: http://www.servicenow.com/services/training-and-certification.html

ServiceNow Community: https://community.servicenow.com/community

ServiceNow Insights Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCOmiTb5WX3qvGq7Cp3o2KkCiplJyqQOK

For general information about ServiceNow, visit: http://www.servicenow.com/

ServiceNow #VoiceAI #AI #ConversationalAI #Localization #AIGovernance

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