The Amazon Polly Generative engine gets a major upgrade: more expressive, more accurate speech with low latency, plus 14 new voices across 9 locales and general availability of Hindi and Finnish. This drop-in upgrade requires no code changes and is now generally available in production.
Nirva will ship its $249 ambient AI pendant by the end of the year.
We're excited to share three updates to IBM's Granite Speech collection: a new speech-language model, granite-speech-5.0-2b, and revised versions of two models the community already uses, granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc and granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus.
After introducing its Gemini AI assistant to Android Auto last year, Google is now bringing it to Apple CarPlay users. The conversational Gemini in navigation is available today for US drivers, with "rollout happening globally too," according to Google (we've asked for specific regional availability details).
Elevenlabs' new Eleven Realtime speech-to-speech models combine speed and accuracy. The v1 Max variant scores 98.8 percent on the Big Bench Audio benchmark with a 0.57-second response time. Elevenlabs says no model on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard is both faster and more accurate.
Mistral AI launched Voxtral 3, a new family of language models built for real-time voice agents. The system combines speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and a voice agent SDK, supports more than 50 languages, and lets agents tap into external tools during live conversations. It can run on your own infrastructure or through EU-hosted APIs to keep data under your control.
Voxtral 3: Mistral's voice agent SDK for real-time speech in 50+ languages, accurate transcription, emotional TTS, deep tool use.
Yelp is embedding numerous new AI features into its app that can do everything from call to check on restaurant wait times to create personalized recommendations that remember your preferences.
Otter.ai said that it will use these funds for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation.
Deepgram worked with the AWS Forward Deployed Engineering team to port its Nova-3 speech-to-text model to AWS Trainium2 for offline batch inference. This post covers porting to the AWS Neuron stack, kernel-level tuning, a data-parallel Rust runtime, and the throughput and cost results on batch transcription.
Introduced last spring, the Granite Switch project enables a modular approach to model development. Now Granite Switch 4.1 models, armed with a Decision adapter and the fastest ASR model on the OpenASR leaderboard, can move efficiently between natural-language responses, general and specialized decisions, and speech-to-text tasks—all from one hosted endpoint.
Last year, Amazon bought Bee, a relatively unknown startup with a $50 always-listening AI wearable that summarized every conversation you had. Today, the e-commerce giant is announcing two new Bee devices - and a new subscription to go with them. First is the $74.99 Bee Frontier, an updated version of the original Bee device.
Amazon-owned Bee has launched its first new AI devices since its acquisition, including an updated wearable and a credit-card-sized recorder that attaches to smartphones. The devices can summarize conversations, create to-do lists, and integrate with Alexa and Amazon shopping, with prices starting at $74.99.
Square is launching new hardware: a big kiosk for ordering things that has a touchscreen and lets you talk to an AI. It's called the Square Kiosk.
Higgsfield brings creators longer videos with GPT-6 Astra, precise visuals with GPT-Image-2.5, and a path to voice filmmaking with GPT-Live.
It's finally here: Apple's long-rumored smart display, the Apple HomeView, has arrived. I got a first look at the device in New York City this week, and it's gorgeous.
One of the core promises of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it will be able to assist them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which, if you'll believe the tech companies, requires apps and devices to listen, watch, or record users' activity all the time and gather all possible context.
Voice AI often misses important points for its context layer, and causes the whole pipeline to break.
Is Apple hoping to get into the AI-generated podcast business?
Of all the things Alexa Plus can do, I never expected it to make me cry.
Natura’s $99 Interface smart ring lets you summon AI agents with the press of a finger to complete tasks, capture thoughts, and control devices — while doubling as a health tracker.
Google has released an experimental note-taking app that can transcribe meetings and audio files entirely offline, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The app, called Google AI Edge Foresight, is free to use and runs on macOS using the company's on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model.
We’re introducing Falcon-ASR, our 1.6 billion parameter speech recognition model for Arabic, with a particular focus on the Emirati dialect. Developed at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, it also supports English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Add a voice travel concierge to an airline app with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Nova Sonic for real-time speech, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for policy answers. Travelers change seats, check delays, and ask policy questions by voice, while the agent reaches your backend through MCP tools and confirms every change before it writes.
An unsettling Alexa Plus bug has seen some Amazon Echo smart home speakers reduced to saying - and sometimes singing - nothing but "lalala" on repeat for minutes at a time, often in the middle of conversations with users. When quizzed about the behavior, Alexa is apparently entirely unaware of what it's been doing.
Suno is adding a feature called "Speech" to its AI music generator that creates spoken text with matching background music in a single audio track. The company says it's built for things like poems, meditations, and bedtime stories. Suno hasn't said how the model was trained.
Sean Parker, who once taught the music industry what asking for forgiveness looks like, is now back with the labels' blessing and money.
Suno is branching out from the world of AI music, launching a new feature that generates spoken voices based on scripts or prompted descriptions. Speech is now available in public beta across Suno's web and mobile platforms, and allows you to simultaneously generate voiceovers and background music to accompany them.
Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, a new model for real-time transcription.
The $300 million employee tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price.
Hugging Face launched Open TTS Leaderboard to evaluate open-source TTS models using objective metrics, reducing evaluation from weeks of voting to hours. It uses Qwen3 ASR for WER/CER, measures RTFx and TTFA on H200 GPUs and calculates speaker similarity (SIM) with WavLM embeddings, supporting multilingual and voice-cloning comparisons.
Elevenlabs' new speech model, Eleven v4, follows cues for laughter and whispering more accurately and keeps voices consistent across long productions like audiobooks. Its Turbo variant starts speaking in 150 milliseconds and is built for real-time voice agents. On Artificial Analysis' Voice Arena leaderboard, v4 ranks ahead of Cartesia and Google's Gemini.
Deploy a text-to-speech model on Amazon SageMaker AI with the AWS vLLM-Omni Deep Learning Container and stream generated speech over a persistent bidirectional connection. This Part 1 tutorial deploys Qwen3-TTS and streams speech through a Gradio application.
Deploy the publicly available Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base text-to-speech model from Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to a fully managed, real-time endpoint, and clone a voice from a short reference clip. Cross-lingual cloning preserves the speaker's identity across languages.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, adding near-real-time video generation to a native live conversation model to create a dynamic visual avatar that can hear, see and speak. It is available on Gemini Enterprise from today.
The AWS WhisperX Deep Learning Container packages Whisper, wav2vec2 forced alignment, and speaker diarization into a GPU-ready image. Learn how to deploy it to Amazon SageMaker AI real-time and asynchronous endpoints for word-level, speaker-labeled transcription, plus the production details that matter: the GPU AMI pin, scaling, and cost controls.
Meta positioned Muse as a personal agent at Connect 2026 and announced hardware and feature updates around it. Muse supports voice and live video, runs tasks in the background and will come to all Meta glasses. Each Muse has its own email address, the Mac version supports computer use, and its connector platform has more than 1,500 apps.
Tool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts . They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the ability to create a custom voice with "just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to use".
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS. The former targets character design and line-by-line performance direction, while the latter targets high-concurrency voiceovers and voice agents.
Using GPT-5.6, Ringg powers multilingual agents across voice, chat, WhatsApp, and web for 90% less cost vs. GPT-4.1.