Why speech-to-speech models aren’t ready for the enterprise (yet) | Decagon

This post details the limitations of current speech-to-speech (S2S) models for enterprise applications, specifically citing issues with reliability (inconsistent behavior, skipped steps), factual accuracy (hallucinations, paraphrasing errors), and cost efficiency (higher compute per audio slice). It contrasts S2S with traditional speech-to-text -> language model -> text-to-speech pipelines, emphasizing the necessity of guardrails (instruction adherence, hallucination detection, escalation) for enterprise workflows. Decagon Voice 2.0 is introduced as a solution that achieves low latency and high reliability through optimizations in generation latency (65% faster), fine-tuned models, streaming generation prosody, and infrastructure improvements (regional deployment), enabling agents to handle complex conversational dynamics without compromising precision and control.