Emerging and agentic
Terms that are real but early. Where a convention is proposed rather than ratified, or support is inconsistent across engines, this glossary says so instead of presenting it as settled.
Agent-to-agent communication
Agent-to-agent communication is AI systems interacting with each other directly rather than with a person, and in voice the near-term version is a customer's assistant dealing with a business's assistant.
Ambient agents
An ambient agent works continuously in the background rather than waiting to be asked: it observes a stream of events, decides when something is worth acting on, and surfaces only when it judges itself useful.
Emotion detection and affective computing
Emotion detection attempts to infer a person's emotional state from signals such as their voice, and affective computing is the broader field of systems that recognize, interpret or simulate emotion; the acoustic measurement is real, but the inference from it to a named emotion is scientifically contested.
Model Context Protocol
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that connects AI systems to external tools and data through one consistent interface instead of a bespoke integration for every pairing.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis determines whether what someone said was positive, negative or neutral by classifying the language they used, not by trying to read the speaker's emotional state.
Voice-first browsing and AI browsers
Voice-first browsing means using a website by speaking instead of clicking, and AI browsers are browsers with a built-in assistant that reads, summarizes and increasingly acts on pages for the visitor.
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