The Last Mile Challenge: Making Conversational AI Reliable in the Wild

During the Open AI Spring Update Event with a live demo of GPT-4o realtime conversational speech, Mark Chen called out "If you are wondering about this wire, it is so we have consistent internet" - yet the real-world internet is anything but consistent.

The demo itself showcased another major leap forward LLMs. The model is a step toward more natural human-computer interaction-it can be interrupted, and it can even understand emotion in a user's voice. Yet to truly be compelling and valuable to users globally and at scale, it needs to work reliably over challenging real-world internet conditions and across the wide range of mobile devices and networks in use today.

One of the primary challenges is the "last mile" connection between a user's mobile device and Internet Service Provider (ISP). This connection typically has rapid fluctuations in available bandwidth, signal dropouts, higher congestion and packet-loss making it incredibly difficult to deliver reliable and consistent real-time communication (RTC). The same challenges that exist for human-to-human RTC also exist for communication between humans and AI.

For the past decade, Agora has been focused on building out infrastructure and end-to-end technologies to deliver the real-time internet, optimizing performance for natural conversations despite wireless last mile challenges.

Agora's infrastructure is used by thousands of app developers globally, powering reliable real-time communications on over 3B mobile devices with over 60B minutes per month of audio and video usage. Natural communication between humans and AI requires a stable and reliable real-time internet. Learn more about how Agora helps developers build conversational AI.