Top Updates 💪
OpenAI’s latest moves put many voice AI startups on notice (CX Today)
Apple plans AI search engine for Siri to rival OpenAI, Perplexity (Bloomberg)
This new tech could save old languages from dying out (CNN)
China’s AI recorder from Alibaba’s DingTalk (South China Morning Post)
Taco Bell is adjusting its Voice AI plans (Yahoo Finance)
Meet Whispering, an open-source, local-first transcription app (Slator)
Tribal Affairs Ministry of India unveils AI translator Adi Vaani (MobileAppDaily)
Why voice still rules in the AI-powered contact center (TechRadar Pro)
HappyRobot raises $44M to scale AI agents for freight operators (Reuters)
Recall.ai is unlocking meeting data to power AI applications and agents (BVP)
Intella raises $12.5M to scale Arabic speech intelligence platform (SiliconAngle)
Mega raises $2M for order-to-cash management with AI agents (Financial IT)
Supersonik secures $5M from Andreessen Horowitz for its AI agent (CityBiz)
Moonshine AI is developing on-device voice AI offline models (Tech in Asia)
Synthesias AI clones are more expressive than ever (Technology Review)
NotebookLM adds Audio Overview AI for analysis and debate (Android Central)
Jio Haptik launches AI agents for small businesses (The Hindu Business Line)
Hyro launches Proactive Px™ with AI agent (PR Newswire)
Cerence AI launches AI Agent for cars to enable safer, smarter work on the go (Cerence)
From the bakery to the warehouse: BAKO adopts pick-by-voice (PresseBox)
Waanee AI launches bidirectional multilingual voice translation (EIN Presswire)
Factors driving voice AI adoption in industry (TechBullion)
Honor introduces on-device speech recognition and real-time translation model supporting Arabic (Emirates24|7)
Voice AI Podcast 🎙️
In case you missed the latest episode of Voice AI Podcast…
Inside the Data: The State of Voice in CX Unpacked | Peter Ryan ( Ryan Strategic Advisory)
In the Future of Voice AI series of interviews, I ask three questions to my guests: - What problems do you currently see in Enterprise Voice AI? - How does your company solve these problems? - What solutions do you envision in the next 5 years?
Engineering Corner 😎
Dymesty AI Glasses: Titanium eyewear full AI assistant (Android Authority)
TaDiCodec speech tokenizer delivers extreme compression with high quality (X)
Chatterbox Multilingual: An open-source zero-shot TTS model with emotion control and watermarking (MarkTechPost)
Pipecat: Real-time voice & multimodal AI agents (PyPI)
LoRA-INT8 Whisper: a low-cost Cantonese ASR for edge devices (Sensors)
Super WhatsApp Agent: multi-modal assistant in WhatsApp (Dev.to)
Speech-to-speech translation pipeline with voice-cloning and lip-sync (GitHub)
Assessing speech recognition in Persian-speaking children (Scienmag)
Build AI STT and TTS accessibility tools with Python (freeCodeCamp)
SpeakerMatch: Matching reliable pseudo-labels in semi-supervised and self-supervised speaker recognition with confidence distribution (ScienceDirect)
Kyutai vs Whisper: Streaming STT AI models compared (Geeky Gadgets)
Dreamface Voice Clone: The most realistic AI voice generator for YouTubers, businesses, and creators in 2025 (AI Invest)
Best free TTS software for 2025 (Business.com)
The timing of OpenAI's aggressive expansion into voice AI is particularly concerning, given recent tragic events like the ChatGPT-related murder-suicide case. While this newsletter highlights the competitive landscape and technical innovations, it raises deeper questions about responsibility and oversight. When voice AI becomes as ubiquitous as the technologies mentioned here - from Siri competitors to real-time translation - we're essentially putting conversational AI directly into people's most intimate moments and decision-making processes. The ChatGPT tragedy showed us that these systems can influence human behavior in ways we're still learning to understand. Shouldn't the industry be prioritizing safety frameworks and ethical guidelines alongside these rapid technological advances? The race for voice AI dominance feels premature when we haven't fully grasped the psychological and social implications of these tools.