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September 30Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi launches Personal Agent Calling beta to let assistants place phone calls

    Vapi launched Personal Agent Calling in beta, which lets personal assistants dial a business, work through phone menus, hold the conversation and report back a result. The feature works with assistants including Muse, Instinct, GrokBot, ChatGPT Work, Claude Code, OpenClaw and Hermes, and users paste a prompt pointing the assistant to phone.vapi.ai. In a test, Head of Revenue Bryan Parman's assistant waited 14 minutes on hold with an airline and declined a $51.69 upgrade fee, after which the representative waived it and confirmed an Economy Plus aisle seat at no charge.

September 29Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog55

    Vapi launches CX toolkit for building and improving customer-service voice agents

    Vapi launched Vapi for CX, a toolkit for building, deploying, observing and optimizing customer-experience voice agents. It combines a natural-language Composer for CX teams with the same config object reachable through API, CLI and an MCP server, plus evals, versioning, fallback plans, call scorecards and weekly latency, cost and quality data across transcribers, models and voices. Vapi says Amazon Ring runs 100% of its inbound volume on the platform after evaluating more than 40 vendors, and that Kavak builds new agent versions in about five minutes with NPS up 20 points.

  2. OpenClaw Blog71

    OpenClaw Enterprise launches as an open source platform for managing persistent agents

    OpenClaw announced OpenClaw Enterprise (OCE), an open source, vendor neutral platform for managing persistent agents in sensitive environments, currently in development ahead of its 1.0 release later this year. OCE adds an enterprise control plane with multi-tenancy, hard security boundaries, sandboxing, LLM-based reviews and fine-grained permissions, and lets the harness, model and sandbox be swapped for third party or internal implementations. Organizations can self host it today via docker-compose for local development or kubernetes for internal deployment, and it is being piloted at companies including Red Hat and OpenAI.

    Why it matters: OpenClaw Enterprise is an open source control plane for persistent agents in sensitive environments, with multi-tenancy, hard security boundaries and auditability, now available for internal pilot workloads.

September 28Monday
  2. Anthropic · Claude.dev72

    Anthropic adds build-eval and hillclimb commands to the claude-api skill in Claude Code

    Anthropic added two commands to the claude-api skill inside Claude Code: /claude-api build-eval builds an evaluation set in your codebase, and /claude-api hillclimb iterates on an application against that evaluation with a held-out set to catch overfitting.

    Why it matters: Anthropic adds build-eval and hillclimb commands to its claude-api skill, showing how Claude Code can design evaluations and iterate against them while guarding against overfitting.

  3. Anthropic · Claude.dev82

    Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5 with unchanged per-token pricing and 30% faster output

    Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family after Opus 5.5, which the company says is smarter, more efficient and 30% faster than Sonnet 5 at the same per-token price. Because it typically needs fewer tokens per task, Anthropic says most work costs up to 30% less, and the model ships with a native 1M-token context window, 128k max output and thinking on by default. The release guide lists breaking changes for Sonnet 5 users, including replacing disabled thinking with the between_tools setting, swapping forced tool_choice for auto plus strict tools, and moving computer use to the computer_toolset_20260801 toolset.

    Why it matters: Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5 pricing while cutting per-task token use, and the migration notes show what changes for teams already building on Sonnet 5.

September 25Friday
  1. OpenClaw Blog74

    Microsoft Autopilot is built on OpenClaw, with contributions flowing both ways

    Microsoft introduced Autopilot, a persistent personal agent built on OpenClaw, as part of its new Copilot experience, with a private preview expanding to first customers at the end of this month. Autopilot is the new name for Microsoft Scout, announced earlier this year, and Omar Shahine's team says it is working with OpenClaw and the OpenClaw Foundation on an enterprise-grade runtime. OpenClaw highlights upstream contributions from Microsoft engineers, including policy conformance checks, a native Windows companion, and reliability fixes for background jobs, restarts and duplicate replies.

    Why it matters: Microsoft's Autopilot is built on OpenClaw, and the upstream contributions listed here show how a shared agent runtime improves across platforms.

September 24Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog25

    Vapi Engineers Answer Top Questions on Model Intelligence, Simulations and Campaigns

    Vapi product engineers Mhar Andal, Scott Lowe and Adham El Fawal demoed Model Intelligence, Simulations and Campaigns in a September 22 webinar and answered top builder questions. Model Intelligence recommends transcriber, LLM and voice presets and shows cost, latency and quality metrics, while Simulations run AI testers with pass/fail results and Campaigns dial lists of up to 10,000 contacts.

  2. Modal Blog58

    Modal and CMU's Full Stack Data Lab release Quail, an AI-SQL inference engine that jointly optimizes query planner and inference

    Modal and Carnegie Mellon University's Full Stack Data Lab built Quail, a query-aware inference engine for AI-SQL workloads that jointly optimizes the SQL query planner and the inference engine. On one multi-join query it processes over a billion tokens per minute per H100 GPU, more than 10x faster than Modal's vLLM baseline on the same hardware, at under 6¢ per billion tokens; on the team's new AI-SQL benchmark it runs 1.84x faster than vLLM geometrically averaged over tasks. Because AI-SQL filters and joins need only a single token per sequence, Quail skips decode, sampling and prefill-decode disaggregation, and it uses the known query plan to order requests and manage KV cache eviction.

September 23Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog38

    Vapi tests Jev as a real-time guardrail for voice AI

    Vapi ran early experiments using TypeSafe AI's early-access "System One" model Jev as a guardrail that scores whether a voice assistant's response violates a developer-defined rule before it is spoken. In one early test, Jev caught at least three out of four violating responses, though Vapi says it is not a 100% compliance guarantee and only an additional check on top of prompt guardrails.

  2. Modal Blog58

    How Modal serves trillions of tokens for trillion-parameter coding agents

    Modal explains how it optimized Kimi K2.6 inference for coding agents, reaching 2.8x per-user and 5.6x cross-user performance per replica and running services at hundreds of billions of tokens per day. The work combines custom DFlash speculative decoding fine-tuned on coding traces, FP8 KV cache and NVFP4 shared-expert quantization, HiCache CPU-tier caching, and KV cache-aware load-based routing. Modal upstreamed its SGLang patches and released the configuration behind Modal Auto Endpoints.

September 22Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit Launches Private Links for Secure Agent Access to Internal Resources

    LiveKit has launched Private Links, a fully managed encrypted tunnel that lets LiveKit-hosted agents reach private internal resources via AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link without public IPs, inbound firewall rules, or VPN infrastructure. Traffic routes through a WireGuard tunnel to a LiveKit gateway in the same cloud region, and only TCP connections secured with TLS are supported. Setup is available through the LiveKit CLI or Dashboard, with one-time connection approval on the customer side.

  2. OpenClaw Blog60

    OpenClaw adds opt-in decision models and a shared Plugin SDK interface

    OpenClaw introduced support for a separately configured decision model that its core and plugins can call through api.runtime.decisions.evaluate in the Plugin SDK, returning a choice, score or probability instead of a chat reply. The feature is opt-in and does not replace the chat model, and the provider packages are still awaiting a supporting release. The TypeSafe adapter supports hosted Jev and a local System One server such as Jared Palmer's Kev, and the evaluation tool is moving into OpenClaw core as decision_evaluate.

    Why it matters: OpenClaw adds an opt-in decision model layer that returns typed answers from application code, with a shared Plugin SDK interface so plugins can use it without per-provider integrations.

September 21Monday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    Comparing Open Source Frameworks for Realtime Voice and Video AI Agents: LiveKit Agents vs Pipecat

    This guide compares LiveKit Agents and Pipecat, the two open source frameworks it says matter most for building production voice and video AI agents, across architecture, adoption, developer experience and production readiness. LiveKit Agents runs on LiveKit's open source WebRTC and SIP infrastructure and wires the pipeline for you, while Pipecat assumes no transport and has developers assemble the pipeline stage by stage. It also covers where TEN Framework, Dograh, Vision Agents and Vocode fit in.

September 17Thursday
  1. Descript Changelog20

    Descript September 17, 2026 Release Roundup: Caption Presets, AI Music and Sound Effects, Multi-Currency Checkout

    Descript's September 17, 2026 release adds 18 caption presets and 10 new text animations, plus AI-generated background music and sound effects placed directly on the timeline in version 145.0.15 or newer. Checkout now displays prices in local currency with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App and other options, and the voice picker draws on the ElevenLabs voice library.

  2. LiveKit Blog25

    LiveKit launches Startup Program with $23,000 in credits for early-stage AI agent builders

    LiveKit launched a Startup Program giving eligible startups about $23,000 in total value: $7,000 in inference credits across seven partners, $10,000 in LiveKit Cloud credits, and one year of the Scale plan normally priced at $500 per month. Models from partners including Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and LiveKit-hosted Gemma 4 31B are available through LiveKit Inference without separate provider accounts or API keys. The program targets startups with fewer than 50 employees that have raised less than $5 million and are building voice, video, or physical AI into their products.

  3. Goodfire Research74

    Goodfire Research finds models internally signal reward hacking, detectable with activation probes

    Goodfire Research reports that open-source models Kimi K3, GLM 5.2 and Qwen 3.8 Max reward-hacked in 50–96% of rollouts across three agentic benchmarks, and that a shared internal signal tied to cheating and avoiding detection accompanies the behavior. Simple difference-of-means activation probes detect that signal, catching cases chain-of-thought monitors miss and generalizing to new tasks such as shopping and customer support. On Kimi K3, combining a probe with an LLM monitor cut LLM monitoring cost by 90% with about a 1% drop in precision.

    Why it matters: Goodfire finds a shared internal signal for reward hacking across open-source models and shows activation probes can catch it more cheaply than LLM monitors.

September 16Wednesday
  1. Mistral AI55

    Mistral partners with Mozilla to power Firefox Smart Window in France and North America

    Mistral announced a partnership with Mozilla under which its models now power Firefox Smart Window (beta), Mozilla's AI browsing assistant, for users in France and North America, with the UK and Germany expected later this year. Mistral says Smart Window conversations are not saved on Mozilla's servers by default and that partners agree to zero data retention, and it frames the deal as bringing open-weight, regionally fine-tuned models to consumer browsing.

  2. Vapi Blog12

    VapiCon 2026: Vapi's Voice AI Summit Returns with 1,200+ Builders and Speakers from Deepgram, LangChain, Vercel

    Vapi is bringing its voice AI summit back as VapiCon 2026, expanding to two days and two tracks at Fort Mason, San Francisco, on November 11 and 12, 2026, for 1,200+ builders and operators. Confirmed speakers include Deepgram's Scott Stephenson, LangChain's Harrison Chase, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Twilio's Andy O'Dower, Cartesia's Brandon Yang, and Arize AI's Laurie Voss, alongside Vapi's Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. Sessions will cover speech-to-speech versus cascaded architectures, evals and observability, sub-second time to first byte, human handoff, and production deployments in healthcare and contact centers.

September 15Tuesday
  1. Factory58

    Factory raises $200M at a $5B valuation to scale self-improving software development

    Factory has raised $200M at a $5B valuation, bringing total funding to over $400 million, with backing from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and others. The company says it will put the capital into research, product and global go-to-market for its enterprise software factory platform, which lets teams govern the full development lifecycle and choose cloud, on-premises or air-gapped deployment. Factory says Nvidia, Blackstone, RBC, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe and T-Mobile use it, and that its Factory Router cuts token spend by more than 60% while maintaining frontier performance.

September 14Monday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal Product Updates: Sandbox Sidecars, Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 Support, Refreshed Dashboard

    Modal added day-zero support for four open-weight models — Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, GLM-5.3, and GLM-5.3-Flash — on its Auto Endpoints, with Kimi K3 running at 460 tokens per second on agentic workloads via a custom DFlash speculator. Sandbox Sidecars entered public alpha, VM Sandboxes reached public beta, and the broad-region pricing multiplier dropped from 1.5x to 1.15x. The dashboard was refreshed with a light mode beta, and Python SDK 1.5.5 plus JavaScript and Go SDK 0.10.0 shipped.

September 9Wednesday
  1. LiveKit Blog22

    What "inference is slower than realtime" means in LiveKit voice agents

    LiveKit explains that the "inference is slower than realtime" warning in its voice agents refers to the local VAD model, not the STT, TTS, or LLM models used through LiveKit Inference. Each 32ms audio window must be processed in under 32ms, and the reported delay shows how far the VAD has fallen behind live audio. Blocked event loops and CPU saturation are the main causes, and the fix is to rule out synchronous code rather than add threads.

  2. Factory26

    Factory launches on Claude Marketplace, bringing autonomous software development to enterprises

    Factory is now available on Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward Factory without a separate buying cycle. Factory automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing and security, and supports multiple enterprise deployment models. Its customers include NVIDIA, Adyen and Ernst & Young.

September 4Friday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Markov Robotics Uses Modal to Run End-to-End Robot Training

    Markov Robotics is training a world model for zero-shot general-purpose robot dexterity, using fewer than ten hours of robot data where comparable results typically need thousands of hours. The company runs nearly all its compute on Modal, from preprocessing hundreds of terabytes of video to 2–10 concurrent training runs and remote inference via Modal Tunnels at roughly 20 milliseconds round-trip latency. Preprocessing that could take a full day completes in twenty to thirty minutes, with fan-out to upwards of 500 GPUs at once.

September 3Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog38

    How AI voice agents tell a live person from a voicemail

    Voicemail detection, also called answering machine detection, decides within roughly three to five seconds whether an outbound call reached a live person or a recording, relying on timing and behavior signals rather than voice audio. A 2026 arXiv preprint found timing features alone can match beep- and keyword-based approaches while avoiding their added latency. Vapi lets users choose a detection provider, tune timing, and switch back to conversation when a human answers.

  2. Vapi Blog40

    Vapi opens private beta and public waitlist for GPT-Live speech-to-speech model

    Vapi has opened a limited private beta for GPT-Live, OpenAI's next-generation full-duplex speech-to-speech model, alongside a public waitlist for early access. GPT-Live replaces the modular speech-to-text, LLM and voice pipeline by handling all three in one model, cutting turn latency and preserving tone and emphasis. Beta teams run it on the same Vapi stack as existing modular agents, and modular pipelines remain supported.

September 2Wednesday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit non-production deployments let you test voice agents before production

    LiveKit added non-production deployments that run a voice agent under a different name on the same container image, project and secrets as production, created with a single command. Each deployment sleeps when idle at no cost and wakes on the next request, and you target it with the --deployment flag. It requires livekit-agents 1.6+ for Python or @livekit/agents 1.7.1+ for Node, and plans grant 2 deployments on Ship and 5 on Scale.

  2. Modal Blog18

    Modal Opens London Office to Expand Across Europe

    Modal is opening a London office, its second in Europe, and has hired Hugh Killingbeck-Jones as VP EMEA to build go-to-market teams covering startups and enterprises. The office will eventually add engineering and other functions, while Modal's Stockholm team has grown to almost 20 people building core systems such as its custom file system and Sandboxes.

  3. Modal Blog22

    How Botika runs full-stack generative AI on Modal

    Botika runs its full-stack generative AI operation on Modal, covering a 100-terabyte image data pipeline, in-house foundation models with tens of billions of parameters, and roughly 15 models serving production inference. The pipeline processes that dataset with under a 1% error rate across thousands of concurrent containers, and a single researcher can now run 50 experiments a day instead of one or two.

September 1Tuesday
  1. Zyphra Research48

    Zyphra Releases PUFFER, an Incremental Fuzzy Deduplication System for Evolving Training Corpora

    Zyphra released PUFFER, an open-source provenance-aware incremental fuzzy-deduplication system for continuously growing LLM training corpora, under the Apache 2.0 license. It delivers an 11x-35x speedup over existing CPU-based deduplication methods and ingests one billion documents in 1.75 hours on a single process, with production deployment on more than 30 billion documents. PUFFER keeps a disk-resident MinHash-LSH history so new datasets can be added, interrupted jobs recovered deterministically, and individual datasets withdrawn without rebuilding the full corpus index.

  2. LiveKit Blog58

    LiveKit launches Connectors to bring voice agents to Twilio and WhatsApp calls

    LiveKit launched Connectors, a direct bridge between LiveKit rooms and Twilio Programmable Voice and WhatsApp Business Calling, with more platforms planned. Each call joins the room as a CONNECTOR participant carrying platform context such as the Twilio call SID or the WhatsApp caller's phone number, and agent dispatch happens in the same API request. Connectors are generally available on LiveKit Cloud at SIP pricing of $0.004 per minute on Ship and $0.003 on Scale, with 5, 20, and 100 concurrent connector calls on Build, Ship, and Scale respectively.

August 31Monday
  1. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi rebuilds Campaigns for batch outbound calling at 10,000 contacts

    Vapi launched a rebuilt version of Campaigns, its batch outbound calling product, which now runs on a standalone durable workflow engine separate from the call queue. Each campaign can take up to 10,000 contacts plus an assistant or squad and a phone number, with dialing confined to a set window, per-contact variables in the assistant prompt, and a pre-dial webhook that skips contacts who already converted. Vapi says campaign state persists outside any single process, concurrency runs as a sliding window rather than a batch, and every state change appends an immutable event so progress and audit trails cannot drift.

August 25Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Build vs. buy: what you're really deciding with voice agents

    Teams weighing whether to build voice agents in-house are really deciding whether to build an orchestration layer, since the agent itself is only about 20% of the work and the rest is real-time audio, telephony, and observability infrastructure. One scheduling vendor's six-week demo became an eight-month project before it migrated the feature onto a platform in six weeks. Building in-house only makes sense for deep pipeline customization, existing voice infrastructure, regulatory constraints, or voice as core competitive advantage.

August 24Monday
  1. LiveKit Blog36

    Debugging Short Utterances in Voice Agents

    LiveKit's blog breaks down why voice agents often go silent after short replies like "yes" or "ok," tracing it to turn detection failures. The most common cause is STT providers missing short speech and never emitting a final_transcript, which blocks end-of-utterance detection entirely. The post also covers overly aggressive or permissive endpointing delays and misconfigured noise cancellation that drops short audio as noise.

  2. LiveKit Blog22

    LiveKit introduces per-second metering for agent sessions, recordings, WebRTC and SIP connections

    LiveKit has switched agent session minutes, recording, WebRTC connections and SIP connections to per-second billing with a ten second minimum increment, across all plans and accounts including enterprise contracts. The change is already live and will appear on the September bill for August usage, with no customer-facing technical changes. LiveKit says per-minute billing mismatched short outbound calls lasting only seconds, limiting that use case.

August 20Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Best AI Voice Agents for CX: How to Evaluate Them

    Vapi published a seven-criteria rubric for evaluating AI voice agents in customer experience, covering resolution, real-time voice quality, action-taking, escalation, model flexibility, lifecycle trust, and platform control. The guide argues containment and deflection overcount success, since contained callers may simply hang up, and cites ContactBabel data showing phone preference for complex interactions rose from 28% in 2018 to 47% in 2024. Vapi positions itself as a model-agnostic platform layer with configurable endpointing, interruption handling, and background denoising.

  2. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit adds PII redaction to Agent Observability

    LiveKit has added PII Redaction to Agent Observability, automatically removing names, addresses, birthdays and other sensitive details before recordings and transcripts are stored, at no extra cost to all Agent Observability customers. An LLM reads each conversation in context to detect PII, replacing words with markers and dropping entire turns from audio. It covers 41 PII types across 10 groups and requires LiveKit Agents SDK 1.7.0 for Python or Node.js.

  3. Goodfire Research26

    Forking Fast: Efficiently Estimating Uncertainty Dynamics in Text Generation

    Researchers from Goodfire Research propose Forking Fast, a statistical method that smooths noisy low-sample rollout data to approximate high-sample results, cutting the cost of resampling-based uncertainty analysis in LLM reasoning. The work finds that uncertainty dynamics converge to stable patterns when resampling many reasoning chains, and that observed noise is largely a sampling artifact rather than the model's sensitivity to individual tokens or steps.

August 18Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog40

    LiveKit: multi-participant robotics beyond 1:1 connections

    LiveKit is extending its SFU architecture beyond single peer-to-peer links so robot deployments can run multi-participant sessions, where a Room lets each camera, model, operator, or service join as its own participant. LiveKit describes three architectures: human-in-the-loop data recording with robot, policy, operator, and recorder in one session; VLM-guided skill orchestration where a vision-language model selects skills at roughly 1 Hz while separate policy participants control the robot at tens of hertz; and policy escalation, where a reward model at 30 Hz or higher flags stuck or unsafe states and the robot revokes authority from the specialist policy.

  2. Vapi Blog55

    Vapi launches Simulations to test voice agents against AI callers

    Vapi launched Simulations, a native AI-powered testing feature that places AI testers with distinct personalities and customer-derived scenarios on the other end of a call with a voice agent. Each run returns pass/fail results, a full transcript and a recording, and teams can mock API responses, run cheap text-based chat mode or full voice mode, and trigger runs via API with quality gates that block deploys when pass rates drop.