Twilio enters Voice AI, NICE lands a $100M deal, and much more

Voice AI weekly digest

Top Updates 💪

• Klarna is hiring agents after AI couldn't cut it on calls (Entrepreneur)

• Twilio introduces conversational AI for voice, messaging & virtual agents (Twilio)

• NICE lands $100M deal with Europe’s largest contact center (CX Today)

• Audible is giving publishers AI tools to quickly make audiobooks (The Verge)

• Microsoft starts testing ‘Hey, Copilot!’ in Windows (The Verge)

• Viaim's AI recording and transcription earbuds (TechRadar)

• Twilio announces multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft (Twilio)

• Rime introduces Arcana and Rimecaster (MarkTechPost)

• Notion takes on AI notetakers like Granola (TechCrunch)

• Voice AI agent that calls customers so you don't have to (Medium)

• AI note-taking app Granola raises $43M at $250M valuation (TechCrunch)

• Best of Show Winner Solda.AI raises $4 Million (Finovate)

• Soopra gets $1M to make AI-driven expert personas into agents (SiliconANGLE)

• Voice AI agents explained: A 2025 playbook for businesses (MarkTechPost)

• TaskUs boosts customer experience with agentic AI and new partners (TaskUs)

• Dialpad unveils agentic AI for pre-emptive customer service (Dialpad)

• Boomi and LTIMindtree put agentic AI into action (SiliconANGLE)

• ThriveAI raises $1.2M in pre-seed funding (Finsmes)

• Zapia raises additional $7.25M in Seed funding (Finsmes)

• FBI warns of deepfake audio scam impersonating officials (Ars Technica)

• Sonos Arc Ultra: AI-powered voice enhancement available (Basic Tutorials)

• What are the risks of Sarvam AI’s new TTS model for Indian users? (MediaNama)

---

Voice AI Podcast 🎙️

In case you missed the latest episode of Voice AI Podcast…

On X

Engineering Corner 😎

• Best transcription services (ZDNet)

• NVIDIA Parakeet 2 vs OpenAI Whisper (Geeky Gadgets)

• How to build an MCP voice agent with OpenAI and LiveKit Agents (AssemblyAI)

• Empowering dysarthric communication: Hybrid transformer-CTC-based speech recognition system (IEEE Xplore)

• Boosting context-aware speech translation with LLMs (IEEE Xplore)

• Deep learning-based speech recognition and LabVIEW integration for intelligent mobile robot control (MDPI)

• Deepfake voice detection: An approach using end-to-end transformer with acoustic feature fusion by cross-attention (MDPI)

• Read AI for iOS summarizes and transcribes conversations (TrendHunter)

• Dictate Buddy transcribes speech to text and syncs with Notion (TrendHunter)

• Set up a native integration with conversational intelligence and ConversationRelay using Node.js (Twilio)

• Spatial speech translation: Translating across space with binaural hearables (Babelfish – University of Washington)