The rapidly heating Voice AI competition has seen the emergence of a startup team called Hojo.
Voice AI represents another narrative that unfolds alongside the development of general large models. While everyone is focused on the general large models, the relatively quieter field of Voice AI is also seeing the emergence of some noteworthy new models. The keyboard is starting to lose its “dominant position.” Over the past two years, OpenAI introduced the Realtime API, Google launched Gemini Live, and domestic large-model companies have almost all begun to invest in Voice AI. More and more people believe that once agents truly integrate into workflows, voice will become a more natural way to interact with systems than using a keyboard. For an agent to truly become part of a workflow, it must first learn to understand human speech. The foundational capability for this is ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition). The most commonly used benchmark for measuring ASR performance is Hugging Face’s Open ASR Leaderboard, which uses the Word Error Rate (WER) as a key indicator. The lower the WER, the more accurate the recognition.