Q&A with Vincent Wargnier on winning the Higgs Realtime Hackathon

The Compass concept is an AI agent that feels like talking to a human, while still leveraging the best agentic capabilities we have today: tool calling, heavy background tasks, web searches, building things, etc. Everything happens through a fully natural, human-like conversation.

I think it could compete with the Squarespaces of the world in some ways, but I don't really see Compass as a website builder specifically. Building a website was more of an example of what a useful agent should be able to do.

I don't know any service today that provides a voice agent experience I find really satisfying. In terms of human-like conversation, I think OpenAI is probably the best today, but after five minutes of discussion I often feel like I'm getting AI slop directly into my ears, without enough actual value being created.

What interests me is: can I talk naturally to an agent AND have it actually do useful work at the same time?

A user could ask Compass:

Compass could say:

At this point it starts the website-building tool and starts checking the event/parking/maps in the background.

But instead of going silent, it keeps the conversation alive:

Basically, the agent keeps talking and asks useful questions that can improve the final results of the tools, and also lets the tools run so that hopefully some results can come back while chatting, before the conversation ends.

Then at some point a tool returns a first result. If, in the meantime, the user added a new specification, the agent can trigger an update to the website, another search, or whatever tool is necessary.

And depending on where the conversation is going, the agent can keep asking questions, talk about something else, or simply end the conversation while background tasks are still finishing.

Basically, like a human would do.

I think today most voice agents are still pretty dumb and not that useful.

My idea is not to build a voice agent just so we can say “look, you can talk to an AI.”

I want to take a normal, actually useful agent — with tools, reasoning, background tasks, etc. — and turn that into a voice agent.

Today, when voice agents launch a long-running task, they often either go silent, say “please wait,” or give you useless status updates.

I think that's the broken part.

Instead of having the agent say “tool running… wait…” I think the agent should remain proactive and useful while things are running in the background.

That’s actually the same type of logic I use for the agent builder in my startup, Magif.ai.

Concerning voice agents, I think it's the same principle: keep the agent proactive, ask useful questions when it makes sense, or stop talking if not talking is actually the best thing to do.

But don't force the conversation to stop just because a tool is running.

The hackathon made me realize that this principle is probably even more important for voice, because silence feels much more awkward in a live conversation than in a text chat.

For me, the key element is the ability to call tools mid-sentence, while the conversation is happening. That's exactly where a voice agent can start becoming as useful as a classic agent while still being voice-first. You don't want the agent to finish a 30-second speech before it starts doing the actual work. Speech and action should happen at the same time.

What surprised me first is honestly how easy it was to integrate.

I asked Claude to implement Higgs through the API, and it basically worked right away. I didn't even really open your website except to get the API key, haha.

And more seriously, I was surprised that we could get this type of real-time behavior working quickly enough during a one-day hackathon. Usually voice integrations can become messy very fast.

The way I see it, a voice agent doesn't need to generate one giant response at once.

It can think about the next phrase, or next few words, while continuously checking the status of everything happening in the background.

The simplest mental model I have is: imagine someone on the phone with you, typing on their keyboard and using their computer while still talking to you naturally.

Maybe they are checking your appointment, filling out a form, searching for something, etc. They don't suddenly become silent for 30 seconds every time they click something.

That's how I imagine the future of useful voice agents.

When one background task returns a result, that information can naturally become part of the next thing the agent says, instead of feeling like a completely separate interaction.

I've been doing hackathons in SF for more than two years now, and I've seen a lot of improvements in the agentic space. But what shocked me is that any time an event is about voice agents, I often feel like we're still in almost the same state as two years ago.

The biggest improvement I've seen is how OpenAI improved the human-like feeling with ChatGPT voice.

But I still feel there is a big gap between “sounds human” and “is actually useful.” My dream would basically be to talk to an AI with the naturalness of the best voice models, while behind it you have something like GPT-5-level reasoning and full agentic capabilities running.

I don't want to choose between a smart agent and a natural voice agent. I want both.

I think today anyone can probably build a basic voice agent with Higgs and Claude CLI without having very special skills.

But if someone wants to innovate, my advice would be:

Don't think “how do I build a voice interface?” Think about how a real human conversation works. A human can talk, think, search, type, remember something, change direction, ask you for clarification and continue another task at the same time.

Then think about how you can simulate that using one or multiple LLMs/processes running in parallel. That's where I think the interesting stuff starts.