Glossary
Voice-first AI
A product pattern that treats voice as the primary input with typed input as the fallback.
Voice-first AI treats voice as the primary input — the path the product is designed around — with typed input as a graceful fallback. It is not "we added a microphone button"; it is "the entire flow assumes you might be holding a steering wheel or making coffee".
Helix is voice-first because most owner-operators are mobile and busy. The triage loop, the approval queue, and the agent setup flow all support voice from the first tap. The Web Speech API powers the input where available (Chrome, Edge, recent Safari); on browsers without it, the typed input runs the same flow with no missing features.
Voice-first does not mean voice-only. Every voice flow has a typed equivalent, and accessibility checks ensure the typed flow is not a second-class citizen. Voice is the fast path; typing is the universal path.
Related terms
In product