At a Voice AI meetup hosted by AssemblyAI and Rime in San Francisco, technical leaders discussed the challenges of deploying voice AI agents in production environments, highlighting the discrepancies between controlled demos and real-world applications. The panelists, including experts from Simple AI, Aquant, and LiveKit, shared insights from their experiences, noting that the realities of deploying voice agents are more complex due to user behaviors, technology limitations, and business constraints. Key challenges include the inadequacy of simulation-based testing compared to real-world analysis, the need for a hybrid evaluation approach combining quantitative and qualitative metrics, and the difficulties in achieving reliable speech recognition in noisy environments. The discussion emphasized the importance of building voice AI systems that prioritize efficiency and accuracy over conversational fluency and underscored the necessity of redundancy in architecture to ensure system reliability. The conversation also touched on the potential of voice interfaces as accessibility tools, indicating a significant opportunity for expanding technology use among non-technical populations.