Top Updates đȘ
Mistral launched Voxtral 3, a full voice agent stack on LiveKit with STT, TTS and sub-second turns, EU-hosted or self-hosted. the-decoder
xAI released Grok Voice 3.0, a speech-to-speech model at $0.08/min that it says handles Starlink and Tesla calls. xAI
Salesforce introduced Launa-Omni, a compact voice model that writes a text reply before speaking it. Salesforce
Sarvam shipped Bulbul v4 Flash, an Indian-language TTS model it claims is 40% faster and sub-250ms. CIOL
Gnani launched Timbre v3.0, a TTS model with tags for whispers, laughs and shouts across Indian languages. AnalyticsIndiaMag
SquadStack launched Arth v2, a streaming STT model tuned for 8kHz Indian sales calls at 67ms latency. CIOL
Otter.ai raised $320M in non-dilutive growth capital from General Catalyst to expand its enterprise business. TechCrunch
Suki raised $90M to move its ambient scribe into agents for referrals and prior authorizations. TechTimes
Ex-Plaud exec raised $26M for Ambi, an always-listening AI assistant for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. TechCrunch
SoundHound closed its LivePerson deal, taking its customer base to 25 of the Fortune 100. CMSWire
Apple acquired assets of Samplab, a Swiss AI audio startup, surfaced via an EU filing. AppleInsider
Amazon launched Bee Frontier and Eclipse, two always-listening AI wearables starting at $74.99. CNBC
Phonak launched Roger On Sphere, a remote mic doing real-time deep-neural-network speech separation for hearing devices. Sonova
Superwhisper and Cohere partnered on a fully on-device meeting recorder to challenge Otter and Granola. BetaKit
Hedy launched Hedy for Teams, adding on-device transcription and EU data residency for organizations. Yahoo
Deepgram said it is targeting air-gapped laptops, running its models natively on-device with Dell. SiliconANGLE
The FBI arrested a former OpenAI employee over a hidden recording device found in an executive conference room. NBC News
A new report put deepfake fraud at $40B/year, with voice cloning behind about 22% of incidents. SecurityBrief
Kira AI launched âlife operating softwareâ that places calls, books trips and negotiates bills with approvals. OpenPR
Exotelâs Sachin Bhatia argued voice AI should move to outcome-based pricing, not per-minute billing. NewsBytes
Vobiz raised $1M to build an AI-native telephony layer targeting sub-80ms carrier latency for voice agents. Inc42
FonadaLabs pitched reliability-first voice AI with India-hosted models and telephony for regulated sectors. IT Voice
New research flagged accent bias in voice AI, warning travel firms that transcripts can misrecord commitments. Travel And Tour World
PolyAI and Otter execs said voice AI lacks its âChatGPT moment,â citing speed and transcription gaps. TechCrunch
CEOWORLD argued the next breakthrough is reliability, not how human the voice sounds. CEOWORLD
CMSWire noted friendly voice bots still fail on pauses, interruptions and broken handoffs. CMSWire
Boya launched the Notra Nano, a 24g wearable recorder with transcription in 140+ languages and 16-hour battery. Newsshooter
Engineering Corner đ
Fish Audio released Drama 3, a 35B open-weight MoE TTS model on Hugging Face with word-level direction. MarkTechPost
Canonical shipped Myna as a tech preview, a local Ubuntu dictation tool supporting Parakeet, Whisper and FunASR. 9to5Linux
Deepgram ported Nova-3 to AWS Trainium2, processing 11-70% more audio per dollar on batch workloads. AWS
NYU Stern detailed Viva, a voice AI that runs and grades oral exams at about $0.42 per student. CACM
A new paper studied TTS and voice-conversion augmentation to improve ASR on banking call-center audio. arXiv
FinancialIT broke down why bank collections calls are hard, pointing to latency, escalation and compliance. FinancialIT
NoiseWorks released PloseAssist, a free plugin that removes vocal plosives automatically. Sonicstate