Built for the Ear: Designing Conversations for Voice AI

Voice AI success starts with use-case selection: tasks ending in a link, code, or number belong in chat, while urgent, hard-to-type, or emotionally loaded problems suit voice. Chat scripts must be rewritten for the ear—split long passages into single-idea turns, restate collected details like dates aloud, and limit spoken options to two or three. One staffing company cut downstream placement errors by 30% by confirming each slot as it was collected, and another team trimmed 40 seconds off average call duration by turning open questions into choices.