###### Podcasts ###### Jan 27, 2026 # How Inworld Is Crafting the Future of Real-Time Interaction — with CEO Kylan Gibbs You can’t “AI strategy” your way to product-market fit. You have to measure your way there. Just dropped a new episode of Skywatch ( [Bluejay (YC X25)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/get-bluejay/)'s car podcast on conversational AI) with [Kylan Gibbs](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylangibbs/), CEO & co-founder of [Inworld AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/inworld-ai/) — and we went deep on something I think the whole industry is about to relearn: Most teams are still shipping voice + agents based on vibes (“this sounds good to me”)… …but their users don’t think it does. This convo felt extra timely because Inworld shipped TTS-1.5 last week — a very “benchmarks-first” release: improved expressiveness + lower word error rates, plus real-time latency/cost targets that actually make consumer-scale voice feasible. A few takeaways I’m still thinking about: 🔹 Quality is not universal. “Good” depends on the customer, the demographic, and the context (support vs health coach vs gaming). 🔹 Offline benchmarks help, but online experiments are where the truth comes out. A/B tests + real user outcomes > opinions. 🔹 The pipeline matters more than any single model. STT ↔ LLM ↔ TTS are coupled — the “best” component alone rarely wins. 🔹 Cost + latency unlock new products. When voice gets cheap + fast enough to iterate, experimentation stops being a luxury. If you’re building in voice, real-time infra, or agentic systems, you’ll love this one.