We've had voice input and voice output with computers for a long time, but it's never felt like spoken conversation. At best it's a series of separate voice notes. It feels more like texting than talking. These demos show people talking to artificial intelligence. This is new. Humans are more partial to talking than writing. When people talk to each other (in person or over low-latency audio) there's a rich metadata…
The "magic" moment really hit in this, like you're saying. Watching it happen and being like "this is a new thing". Not only does it respond in basically realtime, it concocts a _whole response_ back to you as well. It's like asking someone what they think about chairs, and then that person being able to then respond to you with a verbatim book on the encyclopedia of chairs. Insane.
I'm also incredibly excited about the possibility of this as an always available coding rubber duck. The multimodal demos they showed really drove this home, how collaboration with the model can basically be as seamless as screensharing with someone else. Incredible.