Voice AI
12 published articles
Open-weight speech for production voice agents
Magpie TTS spends 32ms of your voice agent's latency budget
Magpie TTS reports 32ms time-to-first-audio on an NVIDIA B200 and adds Arabic, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese, bringing its roster to 12 languages. The open-weights pitch: self-hosted speech synthesis no longer loses the latency argument.
2026-08-16
Election Integrity
Voice AI meets democracy: ElevenLabs signs first electoral authority pact
ElevenLabs partners with Brazil's election authority to add voice AI to election information services, while expanding safeguards against misuse. The company also works with policymakers and detection firms to protect the 2026 elections.
2026-08-09
Voice Agents
Why Grok 4.1 Fast beats smarter models on a phone call
Overall leaderboards pick the wrong LLMs for voice calls. BenchLM's 2026 ranking puts latency first: Grok 4.1 Fast answers in 0.54s while Claude Opus 4.6, the top scorer, needs 1.78s. Fast models take the conversation; reasoning models stay on background tool calls.
2026-08-05
AI Strategy
Microsoft's in-house AI models are cutting costs by 89% in production
Microsoft's in-house MAI models are live in production, delivering dramatic cost savings across multiple products. The numbers signal a strategic shift: the company is now competing on inference efficiency, not just model quality.
2026-07-29
Partnership
ElevenLabs just got the UK government to put a testbed for voice AI in public services
ElevenLabs has signed an MOU with the UK government's DSIT to test voice AI in public services, focusing on accessibility for visually impaired, elderly, and linguistically diverse communities. The company is expanding its London HQ and doubling UK staff to 200.
2026-07-28
Digital Government
Greece just did what three governments haven't: it bet voice AI on a dying dialect
Greece is partnering with ElevenLabs to bring voice AI to gov.gr, tourism portals, and preservation of regional dialects like Cretan. The deal was signed by the Minister of Digital Governance and AI, Dimitris Papastergiou, and marks the first state-level voice AI pact in Southern Europe.
2026-07-27
European AI
ElevenLabs brought its AI summit to Warsaw. The message is bigger than voice tech.
ElevenLabs hosted its third summit in Warsaw at the National Opera, drawing 2,500 attendees including Polish leaders and European founders. The event marked a homecoming for the AI voice startup's founders and signaled Poland's growing role in AI innovation.
2026-07-25
Economics
The 89% GPU cost cut that changes the math for every AI company
Microsoft's MAI-2.5 and MAI-Voice-2-Flash models are live in production across Bing, PowerPoint, and Dynamics 365, delivering 84% GPU cost reduction for image generation and 89% for voice tasks. The in-house model strategy is delivering measurable cost advantages over third-party alternatives, and the market implications are significant.
2026-07-24
Speech AI
Voice AI said 'I understand your frustration.' It had no idea what that meant.
Hume's Real World VoiceEQ benchmark, based on more than one million human ratings, tests over 40 voice models across dimensions standard benchmarks ignore: emotion, speaker identity, and acoustic context. The findings show speech-to-speech models vary wildly, and even leading systems often ignore the audio cues humans use instinctively.
2026-07-20
Artificial Intelligence
Sarvam Samvaad just made voice AI work in 11 Indian languages. That's the easy part.
Sarvam Samvaad is an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform supporting 11 Indian languages with sub-500ms latency. Deployable across voice, WhatsApp, and web, it claims 10x ROI and over 100 million conversations processed. The real test: delivering on those claims at scale.
2026-07-14
Artificial Intelligence
The 'um' that makes AI sound human is finally here
MiniMax's Speech 2.8 adds native filler words, breathing, and hesitation to AI speech, solving the 'too perfect' problem that made synthetic voices robotic. The model also delivers 10-second voice cloning and cross-language accuracy.
2026-07-11
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI's GPT-Live finally stops waiting for you to finish talking
OpenAI's GPT-Live introduces full-duplex audio so the AI can listen and speak at the same time. It can say 'mhmm', wait during pauses, and hand off complex reasoning to GPT-5.5 in the background, keeping the conversation flowing.
2026-07-01