Customer service job postings are up ~8% YoY. More voice AI doesn’t mean fewer human agents - it means more conversations.
Top Updates 💪
Vapi raises $50M for its voice AI agent platform, now valued at $500M. (TechCrunch)
Thinking Machines previews voice+video models that can listen and talk at the same time. (VentureBeat)
Wispr seeks $260M at a $2B valuation for its voice dictation app. (Bloomberg)
OpenAI acquires Weights.gg, a voice cloning startup, and folds the team internally. (ITVoice)
Medicare will reimburse AI voice agents that manage chronic care patients. (WebProNews)
Better.com’s voice agent handles 35% of mortgage calls without human involvement. (PYMNTS)
Bajaj Finance replaces 1,500 calling agents with 10 AI voice bots. (TechStory)
Rivian rolls out a voice assistant across its R1 and R2 vehicles. (InsideEVs)
Quiq adds voice AI to its platform and rebrands for enterprise scale. (CSM Magazine)
ElevenLabs signs McConaughey, Caine, and Minnelli for AI voice partnerships. (Deadline)
Activate invests in ElevenLabs to help grow its India business. (BusinessToday)
RingCentral named Leader by IDC, Omdia, and Metrigy for customer engagement. (RingCentral Blog)
Smallest AI runs its TTS on Tenstorrent chips at 4x lower cost. (The Wire)
MindBio detects intoxication from voice alone using AI speech analysis. (BusinessInsider)
Engineering Corner 😎
AWS adds Qwen3 speech models to SageMaker JumpStart for TTS and ASR. (AWS)
Foundry Local v1.1 adds live speech-to-text that runs entirely on-device. (Microsoft DevBlogs)
Supertone open-sources Supertonic v3, an on-device TTS supporting 31 languages. (MarkTechPost)
Coval publishes open TTS benchmarks comparing speed and accuracy across major providers. (Coval)
OpenMOSS gets a C++ port for easy local deployment without Python. (StartupFortune)
ThirdReality ships a $70 open-source voice assistant for Home Assistant. (PRWeb)
Monologue adds CLI and MCP support for piping voice dictation into AI agents. (MacStories)