Vision-language-audio models are collapsing pipelines that used to need three vendors.
Why Multimodal Will Eat the Stack Until recently, building a voice agent meant chaining a speech to text model, an LLM, and a text to speech model. Three vendors, three latencies, three failure modes. Today, models like GPT 4o audio and Gemini Live skip the middle steps entirely — they hear and speak natively. The result: 300ms response times instead of 3 seconds, and emotional nuance preserved end to end. For video, the story is even more dramatic. Sora class models eliminate dozens of legacy tools.