Big week in Voice AI 🔥

Voice AI weekly digest

Top Updates 💪

• Parloa raises $350M at $3B valuation (TechCrunch)

• Deepgram raises $130M at $1.3B valuation (Reuters)

• Listen Labs raises $69M to scale AI customer interviews (VentureBeat)

• Flip raises $20M after automating 300M+ voice AI calls (TechStartups)

• VoiceRun raises $5.5M for enterprise voice AI control (SiliconANGLE)

• Krisp appoints Vimal Nair as Chief Growth Officer to lead India expansion (Krisp)

• Hands-on with Bee, Amazon’s latest AI wearable (TechCrunch)

• Meta Ray-Ban glasses add conversation focus for noise reduction (WebProNews)

• Dialpad launches real-time AI in Japan (MarTechSeries)

• Speechify launches Voice AI Assistant on iOS (9to5Mac)

• Voximplant brings xAI’s Grok Voice Agent to production calls (The Manila Times)

• Multimodal intelligence in finance industry: Audio intelligence (Medium)

• Canary’s AI Voice recognized as best hospitality solution (Hospitality Net)

• RingCentral named a leader in the IDC MarketScape (Telecom Reseller)

• India ‘talks’ the AI walk (Inc42)

• Willow Voice enables accurate, natural dictation (TrendHunter)

• OmniSpeech brings deepfake voice detection into Zoom meetings (ID Tech)

• AI Voiceover Software Market to hit $105.71B by 2035 (Market.us)

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Engineering Corner 😎

• Pocket TTS: A 100M-parameter TTS model with high-quality voice (X)

• NovaSR: Tiny audio SR model, just 52kb (X)

• StepFun Introduces Step-Audio-R1.1 (X)

  

• Why your voice agent needs structure with Pipecat Flows (Daily)

• TranslateGemma: A new suite of open translation models (Google Blog)

• The best dictation and STT apps for writers (The Write Practice)

• Agent CLI: A collection of local-first, AI-powered command-line agents (PyPI)

• Next generation medical image interpretation with MedGemma 1.5 and medical speech to text with MedASR (Google Research Blog)

• Whisper.cpp 1.8.3 unleashes 12x performance boost (Portal Linux Ferramentas)

• STEAMROLLER: A multi-agent system for inclusive automatic speech recognition for people who stutter (arXiv)

• Implementing AI voice agents in retail: Key challenges and solutions (DEV)

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