Waymo released a new film examining how removing journey stress changes travel for women riders, made with a women-led creative and production crew. Waymo says its data shows over half of women riders in established service markets report the service improves their sense of personal safety. The film was directed by Mollie Mills, with cinematography by Autumn Durald.
Speechify's Simba 3.2 debuted atop Vapi's Humanness Index at 99, one point under the human baseline of 100, and Fish Audio's S2.1-Pro entered at 94 with 141 ms time to first audio. The prior leader, xAI's Grok TTS, held the top spot for only three weeks at 95, and the leading score has since moved from 95 to 99. Vapi argues that model-agnostic voice platforms let teams swap TTS models as rankings shift.
A Vapi blog roundup lists five Character AI alternatives for voice integration: Vapi, AnimaAI, JasperAI, Novel AI and AI Dungeon. Vapi is pitched as an API-native Voice AI platform supporting 100+ languages, connecting to 40+ applications, with Sesame-powered voice agents and automated test suites for catching hallucinations.
AI call centers are reshaping customer support by resolving routine calls in seconds instead of long waits, as in the example of an outage query handled in 30 seconds. Gartner estimates about 25% of customer service interactions will involve AI by 2027, up from 2% in 2022, a market worth $15-20 billion by 2027-2028 at roughly 25-30% CAGR. The article covers traditional call center pain points such as slow response times, peak-hour surges and limited hours, and how AI automation addresses them.