#Voice

AISwedish bearing maker SKF has used AI to recreate Hollywood star Greta Garbo, who died in 1990, in an advertisement. The AI-generated figure says it returns for one final work, with its image built from text prompts and its voice trained on audio from one of Garbo's early films. SKF said the project was approved by Garbo's estate and family.

AITeknium announced that an ESP32 is now running at home, with no further technical details given in the post. The post is a brief update that quotes an @adolandev post about Hermes Gadget, an open SDK for a small device that speaks to a user's own Hermes model and can be tested with a desktop simulator.

AIIndexTeam released Index-Echo-S2ST-9B-FP4, an NVFP4 (W4A4) quantization of the Index-Echo-S2ST-9B speech-to-speech translation model, with only its text LLM backbone quantized. Perplexity rose from 3.8218 to 3.9650 (+3.75%) on a fixed corpus, while zh→en and en→zh outputs were semantically equivalent, and full FP4 speedup requires an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU.

AIIndexTeam released Index-Echo-S2ST-2B-FP4, an NVFP4 (W4A4) quantized version of the Index-Echo-S2ST-2B speech-to-speech translation model, with only the text LLM backbone quantized and the audio components kept in BF16. On a fixed corpus, perplexity rose from 5.9332 to 6.4980 (+9.52%), while zh->en and en->zh generations matched the original. Full FP4 acceleration requires an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, and the model loads via compressed-tensors in vLLM or transformers.

AIIndexTeam published an NVFP4 (W4A4) quantized version of its Index-Echo-S2TT-9B speech-to-text translation model, quantizing only the text LLM backbone while keeping the audio tower and other components in BF16. On an NVIDIA A100, perplexity rose from 3.4155 to 3.5113 (+2.81%), with zh->en and en->zh outputs semantically equivalent under greedy decoding. Full FP4 speedup requires an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, while older GPUs get only memory reduction.

AINVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Diarization model identifies who spoke when, including during overlapping speech, and is now available on Hugging Face. It supports up to eight speakers and has 100M parameters. The post thanks users for downloads and trending activity and shares a follow-up answering community questions.

AIStability AI's Executive Chairman Sean Parker and CEO Prem Akkaraju spoke with The Information about the company's work building tools for music professionals. The interview is linked to a report on Stability's push, backed by major record labels, to win over musicians on AI technology.

AIAssemblyAI's Universal 3.6 Pro speech-to-text model is now available in LiveKit Inference, with 45% fewer wrong yes/no confirmations and about 30% less background speech transcribed. It supports 32 languages plus code-switching and endpointing that waits out phone numbers and emails, at the same $0.45/hr price, accessible by switching to universal-3-6-pro.

AIElevenReader is available on iOS, Android, and web, letting users listen to anything they want to read. The post links to elevenreader.io for access.

AIElevenLabs has released Eleven v4, its most expressive voice model, in the ElevenReader app. Users can listen to articles, ebooks, or PDFs in a chosen voice across more than 90 languages.

AIxAI has released an experimental TypeScript SDK, installable via npm install @xai-official/sdk, that covers text, voice, image, and video in one package. It provides access to the latest Grok models along with server-side tools including real-time X search, web search, code execution, and remote MCP.

AINVIDIA reports that fine-tuning Nemotron 3.5 ASR reduced word error rate on Najdi and Hijazi Saudi Arabic from 55% to 30%. The post says a new tutorial shows how to adapt the model for other dialects and languages.

AIElevenLabs has achieved FedRAMP 20x Class A certification, covering ElevenAgents and its Text to Speech and Speech to Text APIs when run in Zero Retention Mode with US data residency. The company says the published evidence package and FedRAMP Marketplace listing should shorten security reviews for public sector and regulated buyers. The certification extends ElevenLabs for Government, its dedicated offering for federal agencies.

AIMicrosoft's MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash are now live on LiveKit for building voice agents. LiveKit says MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts at #1 on the Artificial Analysis accuracy leaderboard, and suggests pairing it with MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for efficient, expressive voice agents.

AIMicrosoft AI's MAI voice models are now accessible through OpenRouter, according to the announcement. The quoted OpenRouter post highlights MAI-Voice-2.1, a text-to-speech model that supports 23 languages with native accents and is priced at $22 per 1M characters.

AISuno warns that its beta feature may produce unusual outputs and invites users to submit feedback to improve it. A quoted user reports that in brief Brazilian Portuguese tests, the output had long pauses, shifted to European Portuguese mid-sentence, and produced strange sounds.

AIMicrosoft AI's Voice and Transcribe Streaming model is now available on Vercel for building agents, and the post claims it ranks first for quality and speed. The post says it is cheaper than other hyperscalers and 60% cheaper than Eleven Labs.

AIGoogle's September 2026 roundup highlights Gemini 4 Argon, a frontier model with a 1-million-token output limit aimed at complex tasks such as cybersecurity defense. Argon is rolling out first to trusted cyber defenders through the Fairwind Program, with developer, enterprise, and consumer access to follow after guardrail feedback. The post also covers Gemini 3.8 Flash, Connected Apps in Gemini, and WeatherNext 3.

AIA post from TypeSafe AI promotes Jev, a tool it says gives AI bots a way to listen. The quoted post from @SoCalJayF describes using Jev as a semantic VAD in a real-time voice AI, combining the live transcript and recent conversation to judge whether a user has finished speaking, including through hesitations and pauses. The integration was built with Agora ConvoAI.

AI@MicrosoftAI @MicrosoftAI STT plugin guide here:

AILiveKit now supports Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for building voice agents. MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts at #1 on the Artificial Analysis accuracy leaderboard. Developers can pair it with MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash to build efficient and expressive voice agents.

AIThe author jokes about founding a consulting firm that would use agents for work, Griffin for meetings, and Griffin for interviews to fill remote roles. They then question whether remote engineers and consultancies would still be needed if that became reality. The quoted Tavus post says Griffin passed a video Turing test with 48% of live interlocutors believing it was human.

AIMicrosoft AI's MAI models are now accessible to developers via Vercel, including the newest releases MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The partnership brings these models into Vercel's AI Gateway as another route for building Microsoft AI models into applications.

AIVercel has made Microsoft AI's MAI-Voice-2.1 for long-form and fast-reply speech and MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming for transcription available on AI Gateway starting today. Guillermo Rauch of Vercel said the team is excited to bring the models to Vercel at launch.

AIMicrosoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, which Artificial Analysis ranks #1 of 38 models for final transcript accuracy at 2.5% WER, returned 0.13s after end of speech. Artificial Analysis lists its streaming price at $0.54 per hour of audio, at the higher end among leading streaming models. Microsoft's post claims the model is 55% faster and 60% cheaper than ElevenLabs and invites developers to build agents on its platform.

AIMicrosoft AI announced three new models: MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The source says the streaming transcription model is accurate and aims for natural speech with less waiting between conversational turns for building voice agents.

AIGoogle is launching Guided Vision in Gemini Live on compatible Android devices, letting users share their camera for spoken descriptions and follow-up questions. The model was trained with Aira on tens of thousands of hours of visual interpretation and tested by more than 1,000 members of Aira's Trusted Tester network. The feature is not a medical device, mobility aid, or navigation tool, and it requires Android 9 or later.

Why it matters: The launch shows how a real-time visual model was trained and tested with blind and low-vision users, a practical reference for accessibility-focused AI design.

AINVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will join ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski for a conversation on the future of AI at ElevenLabs Summit NYC on November 11. The post notes that NVIDIA has partnered with ElevenLabs since the company's earliest days.

AIMeta names Ranveer Singh the first Brand Ambassador for Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban Meta in India and launches Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) there, starting at INR 44,300. Gen 3 offers up to nine hours of battery life, a 12 MP camera, and a 6-mic array that cuts more than 90% of background noise. Ray-Ban Meta Audio, weighing 43 grams, is coming soon.

AISuno has launched Speech in beta, which it describes as the first audio model that generates voice and music together as one cohesive track. Users type an idea or existing text, then describe the voice and musical style they want, and the beta is now open to everyone after a month of testing with a small group.

AIIndexTeam has released Index-Translate, a multilingual family covering text, speech, dubbing, and long-document translation across 150 languages. Its 9B model scores 0.8789 on FLORES, 0.8209 on instTrans, and 0.7387 on MEME, and the 2B and 9B models are released under Apache 2.0.

AIKling 4.0 is entering early access, with a wider rollout planned for October, and Kling 4.0 Flash opens to Ultra Yearly subscribers on September 28. The update generates videos up to 30 seconds in a single pass, accepts up to 15 reference assets, and supports up to 10 keyframe images. Upcoming features include 10-bit HDR output at 4K and 1080p and video extension up to 2 minutes.

Why it matters: The post specifies concrete capability limits such as 30-second native generation, up to 15 references, and 10 keyframes, which help users judge fit for production workflows.

AIHugging Face released the Open TTS Leaderboard, which evaluates open-source text-to-speech models using objective metrics instead of arena-style human votes. It measures intelligibility via WER and CER using Qwen3 ASR, speed via RTFx and time-to-first-audio on an H200 GPU, and speaker similarity via WavLM embeddings. The leaderboard covers multilingual results and voice cloning, and it is intended to complement, not replace, human preference rankings.

AIAt Dev Day, presenters attempted to use voice dictation for nearly everything, even when demos failed. The author argues that anyone not yet using voice AI should start, since future products and experiences will be built around it.

AIHiggsfield AI introduced Dots, a joint OpenAI x Higgsfield product offering an always-on creative crew that keeps working while users are away. Users can check in by text, call, or email and pause the work at any time. The post says it is powered by GPT-6.1 Sol.

AIDeedy describes a video generation pipeline built around Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, routing image, video, audio, and TTS models through OpenRouter's single API key. The workflow adds reference-image consistency, animatics before full renders, a critic skill that screenshots and transcribes output for QA, and ffmpeg for most editing.

AIOpenBMB announced that MiniCPM-o 4.5 is now supported in SGLang Omni v0.1.7, giving developers more flexibility to run and build with the model. The background release notes add that MiniCPM-o 4.5 brings multimodal input and speech output to the runtime. MiniCPM-o and MiniMax-Music3 also gained Intel XPU support in the same release.

AIAudio8 ASR Infinite transcribes Chinese and English audio of unlimited length using a rolling KV Cache that avoids accumulated drift. At a 480 ms delay, it reports 1.75 CER on AISHELL-1, 2.89 on AISHELL-4, and 3.04/6.81 WER on LibriSpeech test-clean/test-other. The preview release is under Apache 2.0, with deployment through an adapted vLLM stack.

AIAn OpenAI developer experience team member argues voice agents need not always speak back, outlining speech-to-speech, speech-to-action, and event-to-speech as emerging design modes. He cites form filling, creative tools, and computer use as examples of speech-to-action, which he calls among the most underexplored areas. He says event-to-speech is still very exploratory, with hands-free recipe guidance and proactive alerts as examples.

AIMeta is promoting its newest AI-powered glasses, touting a wider range of styles and more hands-free AI assistance. The post says the glasses are lighter and offer the longest battery life to date, announced at Meta Connect.