Phonic takes gold on Tau Voice English! Its the first time that a model not produced by one of the big labs (openai/xai/gemini) has come out on top. Congrats to @NikhilKMurthy, @moinnadeem and the Phonic team, this is huge! Phonic-1: Leaderboard:

Agents have moved from mostly reactive, one-and-done support conversations to interactions that can last weeks or months and drive growth. That shift raises important compliance questions for businesses. Introducing Compliance Console, giving companies the guardrails and controls to help their agents follow the rules that apply to them. Read more:

What gets labeled FDE is a very wide spectrum right now. What companies like Sierra do well is allow FDEs real autonomy to deliver meaningful customer outcomes while also making meaningful contributions to the core product. A pivot from SWE to FDE can be an incredible move for lots of people, but make sure the company can give you concrete examples of platform/product work that FDEs have driven before joining. "Engineer with customer facing skills" is a great pitch but only if you actually get to flex both your engineering and customer facing muscles in roughly equal measure.

The solution to most problems in science is more science. We need the best researchers working on security so we can have our cake and eat it: the pace we want and the safety we need.

Companies will invest more in AI when they're paying for the value delivered vs usage. It's about charging for outcomes not tokens. @btaylor in conversation with Saul Van Beurden from @WellsFargo.

Excited to announce our first Summit speaker in Asia Pacific: Yod Chinsupakul, CEO of LINE MAN Wongnai, will join Bret Taylor for a fireside chat at Sierra Summit Singapore on 17 November. Register:

At Bared Footwear a 20-minute call about how a shoe fits is time well spent. A 24-hour wait for a return label isn’t. Their AI agent now handles the quick fixes on chat and email, so the people who know every style can spend their day talking shoes. Read about the partnership:

Voice agents can handle increasingly complex calls, but often fail on the simple details. τ-Entity is a new benchmark measuring whether an agent can correctly capture details like names, phone numbers and email addresses, recognize when it might be wrong, and repair the mistake. Read more:

Awesome time at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. We hosted a fireside chat with Dennis Yang from @Chime. We also co-hosted a fantastic party with 400+ attendees at WAKUDA with our strategic partner, @Plaid. Thanks to Zach Perret for his incredible partnership.

Sierra at Open@Epic! AI agents built on Sierra connect directly to @HeyEpic, so patients can easily verify their identity, book or reschedule appointments, and send questions to their care team. Excited about what’s next for healthcare customers running on Epic.

How well do voice agents work across languages — and how natural do they sound? Today we’re introducing 𝜏-i18n (pronounced tau-internationalization), which extends 𝜏-Voice to five more languages: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, and Mandarin. We also included two new measures for voice quality beyond task completion: interaction, and generation quality. Read more:

For more than 145 years, Singtel has evolved alongside its customers, who now expect every interaction to be convenient, reliable, and fast. Its AI agent responds in a tone that feels natural and locally relevant. The agent is part of a company-wide commitment to AI that includes training 13,000 employees and governance that keeps pace with innovation. Sierra is proud to partner with Singtel as they work to become the world’s most intelligent connectivity company. Read more about our partnership with Singtel:

We've partnered with @stripe so customers can get answers and pay in the same conversation, with no transfer and no payment link. @CedarNY is one of the first to take phone payments through the integration. When a patient calls Cedar's agent Kora about a bill, they can ask about a charge, pay securely on their keypad, and get confirmation without leaving the call — and 71.3% of those calls end in a successful payment. "Medical bills create a moment of real anxiety for patients, and historically, getting a question answered and actually paying the bill have been two separate, disconnected steps. Working with Sierra and Stripe, we've closed that gap. A patient can call confused about a charge and leave the conversation with clarity and a resolved balance, in the same call." — Dugan Winkie, Chief Strategy Officer, Cedar Read more:

As @btaylor just announced we’re publishing the first draft of Personal Agent Protocol, known as Poppy — and announcing 35 new design partners. With Poppy, customers decide what access to give their personal agents, and companies set parameters for what those agents can do. It’s built on open standards businesses already use, and designed to work through websites, APIs, and company agents. This is a starting point — we welcome feedback from companies, developers, and personal agent builders to help shape this new protocol. Read more here: or read the draft here:

Watch the Personal Agent Protocol in action. @Redfin and @RocketOTD agents working with Muse to find homes in Michigan and get a user pre-approved for a mortgage. Thank you to Alex McGillis for a great demo.

Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement. Read more: