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State of Voice AI 2026
Executive Summary: Five Key Takeaways
Voice Technology is Foundational
of organizations consider voice AI core to their strategy
20
%
Voice AI has shifted from an emerging technology to a foundational pillar of business strategy with 92% capturing speech data.
Future is Bright
plan to increase voice AI budgets
20
%
Companies are making space in budgets specifically for voice technology integration across customer journeys.
Voice AI Agents Revolution
Use traditional voice agents
20
%
But only 21% are very satisfied, highlighting the shift toward human-like AI agents.
Flexibility Drives Adoption
Cite fine-tuning as key to adoption
20
%
Organizations prioritize customization and compatibility with existing systems.
Compliance & Accessibility
Cite compliance as primary motivator
20
%
Voice AI naturally extends accessibility and helps meet evolving regulatory standards.
Survey Highlights
Respondent Profile
from enterprises with over $100M in revenue
20
%
C-suite executives and key decision-makers
20
%
technically-inclined (Engineering, Data Science, AI)
20
%
Voice Technology Adoption
actively use some form of voice technology
20
%
capture and analyze speech data
20
%
transcribe more than half of interactions
20
%
Voice AI Agents
actively developing voice AI agents
0
%
plan to deploy within 12 months
20
%
see customer service automation as most transformative use case
20
%
Industries Represented
Retail/E-commerce
16%
Restaurant/QSR
14%
Healthcare
13%
Telecom
13%
Finance/Banking
12%
Contact Center/BPO
11%
Insurance
8%
Voice Technology Satisfaction
Voice AI Adoption & Benefits
Barriers to Voice AI Implementation
Budget Expectations Over Next 12 Months
Most Important Voice AI Features
Voice AI Use Cases
Deepgram's Vision for Voice AI
Speech-to-Speech is the Future – Enterprise-grade architecture that enables natural, real-time voice interactions while preserving intonation, emotional tone, and contextual nuances.
“2024 was a stellar year for Deepgram, as our traction is accelerating and our long-term vision of empowering developers to build voice AI with human-like accuracy, human-like expressivity, and human-like latency is materializing.” – Scott Stephenson, CEO & Co-founder, Deepgram
Deepgram expects to end 2025 as the industry’s only end-to-end speech-to-speech solution built to solve critical enterprise challenges: Accuracy, Cost Efficiency, Minimal Latency, and Context Understanding.
The Future of Voice AI
2026 marks a key turning point for the widespread adoption and sophistication of voice technology. With advancements in large language models, speech recognition, and real-time processing, voice AI agents are becoming increasingly proficient in maintaining natural, context-aware conversations across multiple domains.
20
%
Plan to increase budgets
20
%
Expect benefits across touchpoints
20
%
Will deploy AI agents within 12mo
Key trends include improved natural language understanding, enhanced conversational abilities, real-time processing, emotion-aware responses, and heightened focus on privacy and ethical considerations.
About the Report
Opus Research fields an annual survey of 400 decision-makers to identify, evaluate and quantify emerging trends and business use cases for voice technologies.
Survey conducted in partnership with Deepgram across North America representing eight vertical industries.
About Opus Research
A diversified advisory and analysis firm providing critical insight on software and services that support digital transformation.
Focused on intelligent assistance, NLU, machine learning, conversational AI, and service automation.
About Deepgram
The leading voice AI platform for enterprise use cases, offering speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full speech-to-speech capabilities.
Over 200,000 developers build with Deepgram’s voice-native foundational models.