AI power users are increasingly controlling their agents via voice commands, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to get computers to understand us. Voice is our most natural form of daily communication, and the transition from keyboards and mice to conversation is profound. But it’s not just about turning our words into text, we have to train the technology to understand what we mean, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told Semafor last week in an interview about the company’s new voice transcription model, MAI-Transcribe-1.

There’s so much data in the spoken word that gets lost when those words are converted to text — just like compressing an audio file into a fuzzy MP3 removes some of the music. We’ll be watching this space more closely.