Real-Time Multimodal Interaction Is the Next Watershed in Human-Machine Relations

I understand that I'm still at the "reading papers" stage. When my senior labmates discuss embodied intelligence and multimodal alignment, I often can't get a word in. But one booth at WAIC 2026 suddenly made me feel like—the abstract concepts in those papers might be turning into something we use every day. That booth was Soul, a platform I originally just saw as a "social app." Their demo of real-time multimodal interaction led me to a core realization: the next step in human-computer interaction isn't about making conversations smoother, but teaching AI to truly "see" and "respond" to the whole person in that moment.