Events đ€
Twilio and Tessl host a London builder meetup on conversational AI (Oct 14, London, Luma)
pyannoteAI, Gladia, and Modal dig into the production voice stack (Oct 14, Paris, Luma)
WarsawJS puts voice AI on stage at Meetup #143 (Oct 14, Warsaw, WarsawJS)
Top Updates đȘ
Amazon ships Nova 2.5 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model on Bedrock with stronger reasoning, tool calling, and lower latency for real-time voice agents. (AWS)
Sierra launches Fleming-1, a model that scores a callerâs audio in real time to flag whether the voice on the line is an AI agent. (Unite.AI)
Krisp makes its flagship Voice Isolation model 2x faster with no quality loss. (Krisp)
Automation Anywhere agrees to acquire Boost.ai, extending from employee service into customer-facing conversational and voice AI. (SiliconAngle)
Apple acqui-hires Huxe, the personalized-audio startup from ex-NotebookLM developers, licensing its tech and hiring the team. (AI Weekly)
Sarvam launches Kivi for Mac, a voice productivity app powered by Saaras V4 that dictates and edits across apps in 22+ Indian languages. (Moneycontrol)
Krisp ranks #2 of 500 on Cybernewsâ AI Trustworthiness index, scoring 97/100 with perfect marks on security, transparency, and privacy. (Krisp)
TII releases Falcon-ASR, a 1.6B Arabic and Emirati speech model it says beats far larger systems on its benchmarks. (FourWeekMBA)
Google opens its SynthID detector to the public, a website that checks whether media carries Googleâs AI watermark. (TechCrunch)
Google releases AI Edge Foresight, a free offline Mac note-taker that transcribes and answers questions locally. (The Verge)
Googleâs Pixel 11 adds Call for Me, letting Gemini place routine business calls on your behalf with a live transcript. (AFR)
DeepL Voice makes Fast Companyâs Next Big Things in Tech 2026, cited for voice-to-voice translation that preserves each speaker. (PR Newswire)
A Nasscom-Krisp report finds only 13% of Indian enterprises have scaled voice AI, with 31% in limited production. (Deccan Herald)
eHealth moves its voice AI from pilot to full-time, using Regalâs Alice to prescreen up to half a million Medicare calls per enrollment window. (Customer Experience Dive)
EliseAI partners with Nextech to co-develop agentic voice AI for ophthalmology, dermatology, and other specialty practices. (Manila Times)
AudioShake launches The Refinery, turning overlapping real conversations into speaker-separated AI training data. (Unite.AI)
Rebel Audio raises a $10M Series A for an AI podcast production platform with translation, clipping, and one-click publishing. (Hollywood Reporter)
Sonilo raises $11M, led by B Capital, for a model that generates music and sound effects synced to video. (Variety)
AncSonic debuts an on-device audio AI architecture, its SORC design targeting earbuds and headphones on low-memory silicon. (Benzinga)
Voice AI lawsuits put contact centers on BIPA watch, as new voiceprint suits against Walmart and Loweâs extend the theory to customer service. (CX Today)
OpenAI plans to retire its legacy TTS voices, drawing pushback from creators who built around tts-1 and gpt-4o-mini-tts. (Six Colors)
The Verge argues we canât quietly redefine ârecordingâ, as always-on AI hardware blurs what counts as captured. (The Verge)
A brain implant decodes speech and gestures at once, a UCSF study driving a full-body avatar for two paralyzed participants. (Fast Company)
Boston builds an AI âdictionaryâ of rat calls, using ultrasonic mics and models to map infestations while redacting human speech. (Northeastern)
Engineering Corner đ
Google releases EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M on-device multimodal embedding model spanning text, vision, and audio under Apache 2.0. (Google Developers)
LiveKitâs Jesse Hall reframes voice latency as a budget, arguing turn-taking and time-to-first-audio matter more than raw model speed. (BigGo)
Pindrop breaks down detecting Metaâs Muse voice, a deep dive into spotting the newest synthetic speech in real time. (Pindrop)
A comparison of MAI-Transcribe, Grok, and Qwen STT weighs accuracy, latency, and pricing across the three streaming models. (Tech Insider)
HackerNoon walks through a low-latency STT pipeline for dictation, covering streaming, endpointing, and the latency trade-offs. (HackerNoon)
Salesforce publishes six principles of voice design, with Agent Script examples and before-and-after audio for Agentforce builders. (Salesforce)
VoxLocal is a minimal local voice agent in Rust, running Whisper, an LLM, and TTS fully on-device with no cloud. (Lavx)
babytalk runs offline STT and TTS on an ESP32, a fine-tuned on-device speech stack for noisy environments and microcontrollers. (GitHub)
MemoTask is a voice-first to-do built for accessibility, using ElevenLabs Scribe v2 and a local Gemma model to capture tasks by voice. (dev.to)
Voicesâ CTO argues AI voice training data is now a quality problem, shifting from scraped volume to consented, targeted sets. (TechBuzz)
An analysis of Europeâs voice AI cost problem breaks down what TTS and STT really cost at contact-center scale. (Medium)
A paper tackles low-resource Vietnamese logistics ASR, using LoRA and dynamic curriculum learning for outbound-call speech. (MDPI)