Introducing Chord: a speech model built for customer conversations | Decagon

Decagon developed Chord, a new speech model post-trained specifically for customer conversations. This involved creating a dedicated pipeline for conversational data that preserves natural disfluencies and pacing, using verbatim transcription and a novel recording method for voice talent. Chord is based on a tokenizer-free diffusion model to maintain audio fidelity and improve steerability for emotion, pace, and emphasis. Production deployment is handled on Modal. The model demonstrated improvements in resolution rate (6.1-7.1 points) and reduced barge rates (5.3-14.5 points) across industries, and was found to be nearly indistinguishable from human voices in blind tests.