Top Updates 💪
Anthropic closes a Series H near a $965B valuation, landing alongside its Claude Opus 4.8 launch. (TechCrunch)
Parloa deploys its $350M war chest into partnerships with SAP, Microsoft, OpenAI, Five9, and Epic. (The Next Web)
Exclusive: Krisp scales its infra deployment paradigm (AIM Network)
Greenhouse acquires Ezra AI Labs, folding a voice-AI interviewer into its hiring platform. (PR Newswire)
Alibaba Updates Speech Translation Model, Triples Language Coverage (Slator)
StepFun ships StepAudio 2.5 Realtime, an end-to-end speech LLM with roleplay RLHF and paralinguistic perception. (MarkTechPost)
COLDI launches a turnkey platform for integrated AI voice agents aimed at lead management. (PR Newswire)
What the Language Solutions and AI Market Should Take Away From Google I/O (Slator)
Palabra.ai crosses $1M ARR, a 17x six-month climb for its real-time speech-to-speech translator. (AiThority)
iFlytek debuts 40g AI glasses with an on-device GlassClaw agent and live translation in 122 languages. (Longbridge)
iFLYTEK unveils AI Recorder S6 with long-range voice recording and smart summaries (FinancialContent)
An ElevenLabs-linked deal licenses Stan Lee’s voice and likeness for AI-narrated audiobooks and comics. (Kotaku)
What Apple’s New AI Glasses Mean for the Future of Wearables. (Geeky Gadgets)
A new study shows inaudible audio commands can hijack AI voice models unheard by humans. (Decrypt)
AI Studios Launches Context-Aware Expressive TTS with 1,000+ AI Voices (Business Insider)
What healthcare organizations need to get right about AI transcription. (National Law Review)
Engineering Corner 😎
OmniVoice Studio ships as a local, open-source ElevenLabs alternative with cloning, dubbing, diarization, and an MCP server. (MarkTechPost)
A field guide to production voice agents tackles sub-300ms latency with LiveKit and WebRTC. (dev.to)
A walkthrough adds Gemma 4 speech recognition to a .NET desktop app via a llama-server sidecar. (dev.to)
Vaani pairs speech recognition with Indian Sign Language on Android using MediaPipe. (dev.to)
FlowSpeech offers context-aware TTS with controllable emotion, pacing, and pauses across 30+ voices. (flowspeech.io)
Vowen runs fully offline STT on Windows and macOS, free and privacy-first. (MajorGeeks)