The Model Isn’t the Product. The Output Is.

Yesterday I wrote “The Transcript Was Never the Point,” and it’s driven some interesting commentary. Today, I want to go one step further because, as we broaden the scope, it’s obvious that everyone is watching the wrong race. The conversation in tech circles, boardrooms, and venture portfolios has been locked on a single obsession: which … Read more

The Transcript Was Never the Point

You’ve been saving the wrong thing. For the last three years, the voice AI story has been told as a transcription story. Record the call. Convert speech to text. Search it. Tag it. Maybe run some sentiment analysis on top. Bold words like “insights” get thrown around. Dashboards get built. Teams feel productive. None of … Read more

Summertime (Travel) Blues

Over the past two decades of writing about telecom, mobile and the evolution of how we communicate, one thing has become very clear to me: when companies make it harder to reach them, consumers don’t stop trying. They simply change channels. As someone who has spent more time than I care to admit on the … Read more

GoGo Going Gone

For more than two decades, I’ve been chronicling the arrival and slow decline of legacy in-flight internet, from GoGo’s early air-to-ground struggles to the painful reality of slow, overpriced connectivity that too many passengers endured. In coverage dating back to the rise of GoGo’s ATG and early satellite efforts at blocking VoIP, the pattern was … Read more

Prediction: Meta Will Bring Manus Minutes to WhatsApp — and It Will Change How People Use Voice

By now, it should surprise no one that Meta is methodically weaving AI deeper into its communications stack. The recent announcement of Manus Minutes — an AI-powered way to capture, summarize, and extract meaning from conversations — feels like one of those features that doesn’t stay standalone for long. Here’s my prediction: Meta will integrate … Read more

Apple won the upscale. WhatsApp won the rest. Microsoft had both within reach and let it all go.

Start with the numbers, not the mythology. Pew’s latest report, Americans Social Media Use 2025, puts WhatsApp at about one third of U.S. adults, up from 23 percent in 2021. That is a serious mid-tier platform in a country where everyone assumed SMS and iMessage had permanent squatter’s rights. Drill into Pew’s earlier Americans Social … Read more

Three Years In: From AI Awakening to AI Reckoning

Three years ago, ChatGPT lit a fuse. Not just under OpenAI, but under the entire tech industry. Like the iPhone in 2007 or the launch of Skype in 2003, it wasn’t just a product drop — it was a moment. In the span of 36 months, the world moved from wondering what this chatbot thing … Read more

Working Anywhere: A 2025 Perspective

In the old days, we used to say getting “out of the office” to work somewhere else was taking a break. Now, for me, it’s getting out of the house. You have to realize that I’ve been working from home since the dawn of time. Back in the ’70s, it was calling in scores late … Read more

WhatsApp: The Silent Front Door to AI Over the last two decades, we’ve watched communications shift, from desktop dialers and browser-based apps to mobile-first, message-driven interactions. We’ve seen the rise (and often the fall) of platform plays. But now, as AI becomes the next wave, the real story isn’t in new apps. It’s in existing … Read more

Why I Say “Press 1” Is Dead

Since the early days of VoIP, we’ve been talking about the demise of legacy telephony structures. “Press 1 for sales” was always a symptom of old-school thinking. Now, with OpenAI’s real-time SIP integration, that era is finally over. For years, I’ve advocated for smarter systems. In 2018, when Dialpad acquired TalkIQ, I wrote how AI … Read more