IBM released the Granite-Switch-4.1-8B and -30B models, combining natural language responses, general and specialized decisions, and speech-to-text into a single managed endpoint via Decision aLoRA, Guardian aLoRA, and Granite-Speech-5.0-Turbo-CTC, with memory usage close to the base model.
Amazon-owned wearable AI device maker Bee has launched two new products: the wrist-worn or clip-on Bee Frontier priced at $74.99, and the credit-card-sized Bee Eclipse, which magnetically attaches to the back of a phone, priced at $99.99.
Amazon has launched two always-listening AI devices, the Bee Frontier ($74.99, on sale today) and the Bee Eclipse ($99.99, coming soon), which can summarize conversations, generate to-dos, and integrate with services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple HealthKit.
Square launched Square Kiosk, an ordering terminal with a 21.5-inch touchscreen and an "agentic, conversational voice layer" that understands a seller's menu in real time and responds to customers' natural-language orders, questions, and modification or substitution requests. The device supports presence detection to sense arriving guests and contactless payments. It's for Square Plus or Premium subscription merchants, priced at $1,999 plus a $99 monthly software fee per device.
Higgsfield has raised AI video creation length from 1 minute to over 10 minutes. Its approach combines three models: GPT-6 Astra delivers longer videos, GPT-Image-2.5 provides precise visuals, and GPT-Live paves the way for voice-made films.
Ambi, an AI app founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million led by Luminous Ventures and Huaqin, and launched iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch apps at the same time.
PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen and Otter CMO Alex Gay, whose company makes a meeting-note tool, said at the HumanX conference that despite full-duplex voice models arriving, voice AI has yet to have its ChatGPT moment.
In a regulatory filing to the European Commission, Apple disclosed that it reached an agreement with personalized audio startup Huxe, extending hiring offers to some of its employees and obtaining a non-exclusive license to Huxe's intellectual property—a classic "reverse-acquisition-style" hire.
TII has launched Falcon-ASR in Abu Dhabi, a 1.6B-parameter speech recognition model focused on UAE dialects while also supporting English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
This AWS tutorial shows how to build a voice travel concierge for an airline app using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, supporting seat changes, meal preference updates, policy questions, and handoffs to human agents.
An Android Authority APK teardown uncovered a "Gemini Calling" onboarding screen with examples like "call my mom and tell her I'll be 15 minutes late," suggesting Google may extend "Call for Me" from business calls to leaving messages for friends and family.
Suno launched its Speech feature in public beta on web and mobile, generating voiceovers and background music simultaneously from a script or prompt. The feature offers Simple and Advanced modes, with Advanced supporting custom scripts and adjustments to the AI voice's gender, style, and variation, with a duration cap of about eight minutes. Background music can be toggled off, and the company acknowledges the feature is still imperfect and will keep improving it based on user feedback.
Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, a real-time speech transcription model it says ranks first in accuracy on Artificial Analysis, supporting 60 languages, with first partial results delayed by just over 100 milliseconds and pricing of $0.54 per hour of audio before the end of the year, alongside the voice model MAI-Voice-2.1.
Voice AI startup ElevenLabs has announced a tender offer of roughly $300 million at a $22 billion valuation, allowing employees to sell some of their vested shares. The valuation is double the $11 billion from its February funding round.
AWS deploys Qwen3-TTS on SageMaker AI via the vLLM-Omni Deep Learning Container, enabling bidirectional streaming speech output so audio can begin playing before generation fully completes.
An AWS Solutions Architect demonstrates deploying Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base to a real-time inference endpoint via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, cloning a speaker's voice from a few seconds of reference audio without retraining the model.
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, combining near-real-time video generation with speech to give Gemini's conversational AI a dynamic visual presence, with accurate lip sync, natural expressions and smooth turn-taking.
AINews rounds up AI news from September 22-23, 2026, headlined by Meta Connect 2026, where the Muse personal agent gained voice, live video, and Mac computer use.
Google today released two Gemini text-to-speech models, gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts, offering over 2,000 voices and support for creating custom voices from a 30-second audio sample.
On September 23, Google DeepMind released two text-to-speech models, Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS, which support customizing character voices via natural-language prompts in over 100 languages, cloning voices from 30-second audio samples, directing delivery and dialect changes line by line, and natively generating two-speaker scenarios.
Why it matters: The official announcement details both TTS models' capabilities, benchmark results, and availability, so readers can judge how voice creation workflows will change.
Ringg uses GPT-5.6 to build multilingual AI agents supporting voice, chat, WhatsApp and web channels, resolving up to 65% of customer calls. Compared with GPT-4.1, costs are 90% lower.
Google DeepMind has released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two real-time voice conversation models targeting cost efficiency at scale and high-complexity multi-step reasoning tasks, respectively.
Why it matters: The official release lays out how the two product lines divide capabilities, with multiple benchmark figures that help readers weigh trade-offs when choosing models for voice agent scenarios.
OpenAI introduced GPT-Live-1 in the API, bringing natural full-duplex voice conversation. The model also offers stronger instruction following, custom voices, and telephony support.
Why it matters: The official announcement lists full-duplex voice, custom voices, and telephony support, helping readers evaluate integration options for voice applications.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, positioned as a more accurate real-time speech transcription model with intelligent interaction. The model converts raw audio directly into formatted text, automatically removes filler words and self-corrections, supports custom vocabularies, over 85 languages, up to three speaker diarization, and can call other Gemini models via function calling.
Why it matters: The official release details the model's capabilities in noisy environments, custom vocabularies and multi-speaker scenarios, plus API access, letting readers evaluate whether to migrate their transcription workflows.
Hugging Face released research using three types of tests — consistency disagreement probes, digit silence retrieval, and spelling switches — to evaluate benchmark optimization (benchmaxxing) behavior in 11 open-source ASR models.
Why it matters: The article quantifies benchmark optimization in speech recognition with three probes and provides a model list, ratio data, and reusable detection scripts, helping readers avoid the pitfall of selecting models by WER alone.
NVIDIA has released an update to Magpie TTS Multilingual. The 364M-parameter open-weights model now supports 12 languages, adding Modern Standard Arabic, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese.
Hume released the Real World VoiceEQ benchmark to evaluate the human quality of voice AI interactions, covering ASR, TTS, S2S, and speech understanding, assessing over 40 leading closed- and open-source voice models across 15+ dimensions and 60+ metrics.
Hugging Face and Cerebras jointly demonstrated a real-time speech-to-speech architecture: voice input is transcribed by Nvidia's Parakeet, reasoning is handled by Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 31B running on Cerebras, and speech output is synthesized with Alibaba's Qwen3TTS.
Why it matters: The article lays out a complete open-source speech-to-speech stack with components at each layer, so developers can build or swap parts of their own real-time voice AI pipeline.
Google DeepMind released the audio model Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, offering near-real-time speech-to-speech translation across 70+ languages with automatic language detection. It continuously generates translations that preserve the speaker's tone, rhythm, and pitch, lagging the speaker by only a few seconds.
Why it matters: The official announcement details the model's capabilities, access options, and product integrations, helping readers judge how it changes real-time speech translation workflows.
Google DeepMind released the text-to-speech model Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, which scores an Elo of 1,211 on the Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboard and supports 70+ languages and native multi-speaker dialogue.
Why it matters: The official post introduces audio tags and AI Studio scene control among other new capabilities, showing readers how expressive control of TTS speech works in practice.
Mistral AI released its first text-to-speech model, Voxtral TTS, with 4B parameters supporting 9 languages including English, French and German, positioned for low-latency speech generation. In human evaluations its naturalness beats ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 and matches ElevenLabs v3; latency is 70ms for a 10-second sample plus 500 characters, with RTF around 9.7x.
Why it matters: The original gives key details on latency, pricing, human evaluation comparisons and the open license, helping readers assess its fit for voice agent scenarios.
Mistral AI has released Voxtral Transcribe 2, comprising two speech transcription models, Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime, supporting 13 languages, speaker diarization, and word-level timestamps.
Why it matters: The official post provides latency, error rate, and pricing data for both transcription models and releases the Realtime weights, so readers can compare against their current speech solutions.
Mistral AI rolled out a batch of new features for Le Chat: Deep Research in preview generates structured research reports with citations, voice mode is powered by the new Voxtral model, Think mode is driven by the reasoning model Magistral and supports switching languages mid-sentence, Projects groups conversations while preserving tool settings, and image creation and editing come via a partnership with Black Forest Labs.
Mistral released Voxtral, an open-source speech understanding model available in a 24B Voxtral Small and a 3B Voxtral Mini, both under the Apache 2.0 license and callable via its API at prices as low as $0.001 per minute.
Why it matters: Official benchmarks and API pricing for two open-source speech understanding model sizes let readers assess whether Voxtral can replace their current ASR solutions.