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TodayNovember 13Friday4 items
  1. inclusionAI Models34

    inclusionAI Releases Duo-1.0-distill-quant FP8 Weights for Full-Duplex Interaction

    inclusionAI released Duo-1.0-distill-quant, FP8-quantized four-step distilled Realization weights for the Duo 1.0 full-duplex multimodal world model. The weights overlay onto the inclusionAI/Duo-1.0-causal-base bundle, which supplies the shared Intent, codecs, speech models and Realization backbone, and require a runtime supporting the packaged ModelOpt FP8 format. The weights were initialized from MiniMax H3 and then trained by the Duo team.

  2. inclusionAI Models40

    inclusionAI Releases Duo-1.0-distill Four-Step Distilled Weights for Duo 1.0

    inclusionAI has released Duo-1.0-distill, the four-step distilled Realization weights for Duo 1.0, a full-duplex multimodal world model for real-time audio-visual interaction. The weights ship as a PyTorch Distributed Checkpoint overlay on the inclusionAI/Duo-1.0-causal-base bundle, using an Euler sampler with 4 steps and flow shift 5.0. The weights were initialized from MiniMax H3 and then trained by the Duo team.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog18

    7 customer service skills every human and AI agent needs

    ElevenLabs outlines seven customer service skills — communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, empathy, adaptability, personalization and product knowledge — that both human and AI support agents need. It cites a Zendesk study finding over 50% of customers switched to competitors after one bad experience, and a Gartner forecast that at least 70% of customers will start their journey with an AI interface by 2028. The guide stresses evaluating conversational metrics during training and after deployment, plus seamless handoff to humans for de-escalation.

  4. AWS Machine Learning Blog33

    Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming gains usage-based pricing, Deepgram as launch partner

    Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming now supports usage-based metering, letting model providers report actual consumption to AWS Marketplace software charges while endpoint infrastructure fees still apply. Deepgram is the launch partner, bringing usage-based Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech billing to AWS Marketplace. The design adds a companion WebSocket metadata stream, capped at one message per second and 512 bytes, so providers can send incremental metering records during live sessions.

November 12Thursday
November 11Wednesday
  1. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenLabs Summit NYC: Interaction Engine, ElevenAgents Memory and Routines, ElevenAI app, Partner Program and Marketplace

    At its New York Summit, ElevenLabs announced new models, agents and deployment options for its AI interaction layer, including the Interaction Engine that manages turn-taking and routes each part of a conversation to a cheaper or frontier LLM. ElevenAgents gains Memory, which builds a structured record of returning customers, and Routines, an automation layer for multi-step work before, during and after calls. ElevenLabs also previewed the ElevenAI workplace app with free early access opening today, launched a Partner Program now at more than 550 partners in 44 countries plus a McKinsey alliance, and introduced the ElevenLabs Marketplace; NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is now available in ElevenAgents alongside 15 MW of new Vera Rubin compute capacity.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog18

    Voice cloning for content creators: scaling content workflows with voice AI

    ElevenLabs outlines how voice cloning lets content creators record a short sample once and then generate narration for videos, podcasts, courses, and social clips without returning to the booth. The guide distinguishes Instant Voice Cloning, which produces a clone from a short sample in under a minute, from Professional Voice Cloning, which trains on a larger recording set and includes a verification step confirming the voice belongs to the creator. It also lists selection criteria including voice fidelity, delivery control, language coverage, consent safeguards, export options, and commercial licensing.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog40

    ElevenLabs Launches Marketplace for Enterprise-Ready AI Applications

    ElevenLabs launched the ElevenLabs Marketplace, a curated collection of industry-specific AI and voice applications built on its models by technology partners, with launch partners including Salesforce, IBM, NiCE, Twilio, and Zendesk. Enterprises can explore solutions across financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, retail, and government, and connect directly with the partners behind them. Starting next year, eligible partner solutions will be purchasable through existing ElevenLabs commitments.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA expand partnership to bring voice agents to enterprises and governments

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA have expanded their collaboration across models, infrastructure and sovereign deployments, bringing NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL into the ElevenAgents platform. ElevenLabs plans to add 15MW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin capacity on top of its existing Blackwell Ultra systems, and is powering a voice agent for Poland's Centralna e-Rejestracja appointment system on-premises using NVIDIA Confidential Computing. On the ElevenAgents customer-support benchmark, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL reached leading end-to-end task-completion accuracy at 70% lower cost than other leading open models, according to ElevenLabs.

  5. ElevenLabs Blog25

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs Form Alliance to Scale Conversational AI in the Enterprise

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs announced an alliance to help organizations prove the value of conversational AI through initial use cases before scaling across the enterprise. The partnership combines McKinsey's industry and transformation expertise, including QuantumBlack's AI engineering, with ElevenLabs' frontier conversational AI technology and ElevenAgents platform. Dutch telecom KPN is already using the new AI-powered solutions, and the alliance plans to extend the approach to service-intensive industries such as insurance.

  6. ElevenLabs Blog22

    How Enterprise Clients Are Putting ElevenLabs AI to Work

    ElevenLabs says enterprises now account for more than 55% of its revenue, with its technology in daily operations at five of the 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 largest insurers and four of the 10 largest telecoms. At its NYC Summit, clients including Ramp, Customers Bank, Banco Inter, Clover Health and FOX Sports described using ElevenAgents and ElevenCreative for support agents, onboarding, multilingual service and an AI persona of commentator Colin Cowherd in the FOX Sports App.

  7. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi launches Agent Loop in early access, a self-improving harness for voice agents

    Vapi launched Agent Loop in early access, with GA planned for early next year, as a self-improving harness that builds a voice agent from a plain prompt, scores every call against a business goal, drafts fixes for the misses, tests them in simulations and ships them to a slice of live traffic before full rollout. The loop runs on Vapi primitives including Simulations and Traffic Splitting, available in the dashboard now, plus Goals, Call Health and Experiments, coming soon. Every Agent Loop agent is a real Vapi assistant, so engineers keep full dashboard and API access, and human approval is required before any change ships.

November 10Tuesday
  2. Google Developers Blog72

    Google AI Edge Gallery adds on-device speech recognition and text-to-speech

    Google introduced on-device Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech in Google AI Edge Gallery, letting apps run multilingual ASR and expressive TTS fully offline alongside on-device SLMs like Gemini Nano and Gemma 4. On Android, ML Kit's new speech models transcribe 100+ languages at 10x real-time speed with an 8.0% to 9.0% Word Error Rate on FLEURS, while the few-step diffusion TTS starts speaking in about 100 ms and generates 24 kHz audio at up to 50x real-time speed. Cross-platform support comes through MediaPipe Tasks and LiteRT with open-weight bundles including Parakeet-TDT 0.6B, PocketTTS 100M, Kokoro-82M and Phonon 31M, demonstrated in the XR Language Teacher showcase and voice-enabled AI Chat.

    Why it matters: Google adds fully offline ASR and TTS to AI Edge Gallery, with ML Kit reporting 100+ language transcription at 10x real time and a diffusion TTS that starts speaking in about 100 ms.

November 9Monday
  1. Zyphra Research78

    Zyphra releases ZONOS3-Mini, an Apache 2.0 zero-shot voice-cloning TTS model that runs on-device

    Zyphra released ZONOS3-Mini, a sparse MoE text-to-speech model with 100M active and 800M total parameters under Apache 2.0, trained on 112 NVIDIA H100s in 2.5 days. It reaches under 570 ms time-to-first-audio in the browser on a Pixel 9 and under 150 ms on an M3 MacBook Air, with runtimes for WebGPU, SGLang, vLLM and GGML. The model adds control over identity, accent, quality, mood and delivery, including word-level steering, and Zyphra reports it ranks first among open models on its new ZTTS2-Eval benchmark.

    Why it matters: Zyphra's compact MoE TTS model pairs zero-shot voice cloning with word-level delivery control while running in real time on phones and laptops.

November 6Friday
  1. Meta Newsroom · AI62

    Meta rolls out real-time voice and expressive avatars in its Muse app

    Meta is rolling out real-time voice conversations and expressive avatars in the Muse app on mobile, web and Mac, starting in the US. Users tap the phone icon to talk, can interrupt responses, and choose from hundreds of voices plus voice-only, avatar or full-screen modes. Voice is coming soon to AI Glasses and Muse Charm.

    Why it matters: Meta's Muse app now supports real-time voice conversations with expressive avatars, showing how voice and interruption handling are moving into consumer AI assistants.

November 4Wednesday
  1. LiveKit Blog22

    Clerk AI Uses LiveKit to Power Enterprise Voice Agents at Scale

    Clerk AI is running enterprise voice and messaging agents on LiveKit's open-source framework and global edge network, handling over 1,000 concurrent voice sessions without pre-provisioning. Agents respond in under 500ms and support 30+ languages natively, with ScreenSense call screening at 97% accuracy and TrueReach voicemail detection above 98%. The platform keeps full control over STT, LLM, and TTS providers and holds SOC 2 Type II certification with built-in TCPA compliance.

October 26Monday
October 23Friday
  1. Amazon Science40

    Audible's Controllable TTS Brings Distinct Character Voices to Audiobooks

    Audible's technology team is using controllable text-to-speech to give audiobook characters distinct, consistent voices, guided by natural-language descriptions of how dialogue should be delivered. A BookLLM component profiles characters and identifies their dialogue with 97% accuracy in English and 94% in Spanish, while a synthetic-data pipeline trains the model on captioned speech. Dialogue differentiation improved by 3.7 points on a MUSHRA test, with statistically significant listening-experience gains for eight of ten voices across English and Spanish tests.

October 21Wednesday
  1. LiveKit Blog25

    How Acuity Health Uses LiveKit Voice Agents to Automate Patient Access

    Acuity Health rebuilt its patient-access voice agents on LiveKit after a low-code platform proved too rigid and opaque, and now 80% of calls are fully contained by AI agents. Agents run on LiveKit Inference with the Gemma 4 31B model, most bookings finish in under a minute, and 81% of booking calls end with a "thank you." LiveKit Simulations tests each change against patient profiles before release, and one prompt review cut roughly 24% of words while still passing the same scenarios.

October 20Tuesday
  1. Mistral AI82

    Mistral releases Voxtral 3 speech models and voice agent SDK

    Mistral released Voxtral 3, a family of speech-to-text and text-to-speech models plus a voice agent SDK built on LiveKit that streams listening, reasoning, tool calling and speaking in one pipeline. Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 covers 50+ languages with diarization and context biasing, Voxtral Mini TTS 3 supports 35+ languages and 50+ dialects, and the stack is available through Mistral's EU-hosted API or self-deployment. Pricing starts at $0.0035/min for batch transcription and $13 per 1M characters for TTS.

    Why it matters: Mistral's Voxtral 3 pairs multilingual speech models with a LiveKit-based voice agent SDK, giving teams a sovereign-deployable option for real-time voice agents.

  2. Vapi Blog10

    Vapi Hosts Fleet Week Yacht Event for Voice AI Builders

    Vapi gathered over 30 voice AI builders on a chartered yacht in San Francisco Bay on October 8 for Fleet Week, with fireside chats from Deepgram, Kouper Health and Coval plus a technical workshop. Attendees focused on GPT Live speech-to-speech, which cuts latency and yields fluid turns but trades off granular control over key terms and scripting. Discussions also covered backchanneling, perceived latency and platform versus in-house voice stacks.

October 19Monday
  1. inclusionAI Repositories58

    inclusionAI releases Ming-3.0-tts speech synthesis models in 0.5B dense and 7.9B MoE tiny variants

    inclusionAI released Ming-3.0-tts, an open-weight multilingual speech synthesis family with two models: Ming-3.0-tts-0.5b, a 0.5B dense model, and Ming-3.0-tts-tiny, a MoE model built on Ling V3 with 7.9B total and 1.3B active parameters. Both ship with inference code, a task cookbook and benchmark tables, and support voice cloning, text-based voice design, free-form natural-language delivery control, 14 inline paralinguistic tags, emotion and speed/pitch/volume control, plus Chinese, English, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Sichuanese and Cantonese. On the October 2026 Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboards, Ming-3.0-tts ranks 1st among open-weights models on Controlled Voice, 1st overall on Pronunciation Robustness at 93.2%, and 3rd among open-weights models on Provider Voice.

  2. inclusionAI Repositories58

    inclusionAI releases Ming-3.0-asr-tiny context-aware speech recognition model

    inclusionAI released Ming-3.0-asr-tiny, a speech recognition model that pairs the Ling-tiny-v3 language model with an audio encoder for Chinese and English transcription, dialect recognition and context ASR. Dialect evaluation covers 15 test sets including Hunan, Minnan, Cantonese, Chuanyu and Shanghai, and hotwords or preceding dialogue can be supplied in the prompt to resolve names and technical terms. The repository ships Transformers and SGLang serving guides, and code and weights are released under the MIT License.

October 16Friday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    How to Build a Production-Ready AI Voice Agent

    LiveKit's guide distills lessons from solution architects and forward deployed engineers on taking AI voice agents from demo to production, organized around three questions: whether the agent is smart and natural enough, whether its performance is observable, and whether it scales reliably and cost-efficiently. It recommends measuring the first turn separately, since one company found roughly 3 out of 4 calls ended at the greeting step, and notes clients moving from GPT-4.1 to Gemma 4 31B on LiveKit Inference saved 300–500ms at p50.

October 15Thursday
  1. Modal Blog34

    Augment Your LiveKit Agent with Modal GPUs

    Modal explains how to run LiveKit Agents with open-weights or custom models on its serverless GPUs, using BitHuman's open-weights Expression Video Avatar voiced by Qwen3-TTS to clone Charles Frye. The setup exposes the avatar container's /launch endpoint via a Modal Server and uses Sticky Sessions to keep WebSocket clients on the same container, with GPU snapshots hiding cold starts.

  2. inclusionAI Repositories67

    inclusionAI releases Ming-3.0-audio-flash and Ming-3.0-audio-tiny audio models

    inclusionAI released Ming-3.0-audio-flash, a 126B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts audio model with 6.5B activated parameters, alongside the compact Ming-3.0-audio-tiny at 9.3B parameters with 2.7B activated. The flash model covers Chinese and English speech recognition across dialects and noisy multi-speaker settings, long-audio understanding, non-speech sound and music perception, audio reasoning, and end-to-end spoken dialogue with optional synthesized speech output. It ships with vLLM-Omni, SGLang, and Transformers inference paths under the MIT License, with default Flash profiles using tensor parallelism across four 80 GB H800 GPUs at 128K context.

    Why it matters: The release details a 126B-parameter MoE audio model with 6.5B activated parameters, plus a 9.3B tiny variant, giving a concrete reference for open audio-language model sizing and deployment.

  3. Apple Newsroom60

    Apple launches iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone with a 7.58-inch inner display

    Apple announced iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, featuring the largest iPhone display yet: a 7.58-inch inner screen that is 50 percent larger than iPhone 18 Pro Max's display, plus a 5.4-inch outer display covering 90 percent of iPhone 18 Pro's screen area. It runs on the A20 Pro chip with a dual-battery architecture, and iOS 27 is reworked for the foldable form factor, including Split View for showing Siri and Mail side by side. Siri AI, powered by Apple Intelligence, is rolling out in beta with iOS 27 in English first and will not initially be available in the EU; Apple notes Siri AI and other new Apple Intelligence features will not be available in China.

    Why it matters: Apple's first foldable iPhone pairs a 7.58-inch inner display with a 5.4-inch outer screen and an A20 Pro chip, showing how iOS 27 and Siri AI are being adapted to a foldable form factor.

October 13Tuesday
  1. Apple Newsroom58

    Apple introduces HomeView, a $299 smart home display with Siri AI

    Apple introduced Apple HomeView, a 7-inch Liquid Retina smart home display that combines entertainment, FaceTime calls, home monitoring and hands-free automation, priced at $299 in the U.S. The device recognizes users by face to surface their personal content and runs Siri AI, a new more conversational version of Siri that can draw on personal context when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad. Pre-orders opened October 13 in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S., with availability starting Friday, November 13; Apple says HomeView is not for sale in the European Union because Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS there.

  2. Apple Newsroom58

    Apple unveils new Apple TV 4K with Siri AI and hands-free far-field microphones

    Apple announced the fourth-generation Apple TV 4K, featuring Siri AI, a new version of Siri powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence that offers a full-screen conversational search experience. Built-in far-field microphones enable hands-free Siri use, and with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone the assistant can answer personal-context requests such as playing a show a friend recommended. The device is priced at $299 in the U.S., with pre-orders open in the U.S. and 29 other countries and regions and in-store availability starting Friday, November 13; Siri AI is available as a beta on Apple TV 4K (2nd generation or later) in eight English-language markets at launch.

October 12Monday
  1. Descript Changelog22

    Descript October 2026 Roundup: Drive-Wide Search, Async Recording Requests, and ElevenLabs v4 Voice Clones

    Descript's October 12, 2026 release adds a search bar across your entire drive, with a full results page and Underlord file-finding. Enterprise drives can now send async recording requests so guests record on their own schedule, and AI Speech moves to ElevenLabs v4 for more accurate voice clones. Paid plans also default to MiniMax H3 Max Turbo for AI video generation.

October 9Friday
  1. LiveKit Blog34

    Serve AI uses LiveKit Agent Simulations to rebuild its voice agent on a single prompt

    Serve AI rebuilt its phone agent for a $150M pest control customer on LiveKit, collapsing a 224-node Retell flow graph into a single prompt and validating it with Agent Simulations. About 100 real production calls were converted into simulation scenarios, reaching a 98% pass rate over 10–15 iterations before cutover, with median turn latency of 1.3 seconds against a 1.5 second ceiling. The first migration took one week with no rollback, and containment rose 15%, which Serve estimates saves the customer an additional $320,000 a year.

  2. LiveKit Blog58

    LiveKit launches Agent Simulations for testing voice agents

    LiveKit has made Agent Simulations generally available for all LiveKit Cloud projects, a repeatable way to test voice agents at the task level rather than turn by turn. An LLM-driven simulated user plays out each scenario, including backchannels and interruptions in audio mode, and an LLM judge returns a pass/fail verdict with a reason; a CLI can generate scenarios from the agent's own prompts and tools. Text runs are the default and cheap enough for every pull request, while audio runs cover the full pipeline and are better suited to nightly or pre-release schedules. Simulations are free through October, though they call the real agent's LLM, STT and TTS at normal rates.

October 6Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    Retell vs. Vapi vs. LiveKit: A Developer Comparison for Voice AI Agents

    LiveKit published a developer-focused comparison of Retell, Vapi and LiveKit for building voice AI agents, framing the choice around four questions: who iterates on the agent after launch, what happens when needs fall outside defaults, whether it must run beyond phone calls, and cost at scale. Retell is a managed platform with a visual editor, Vapi a developer-oriented managed platform configured via API and dashboard, and LiveKit an Apache 2.0 open source framework with self-hosting. Estimated all-in cost per minute runs about $0.070–$0.310 for Retell, $0.070–$0.116 for Vapi and $0.037–$0.099 for LiveKit.

October 2Friday
  1. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi opens GPT-Live beta to all customers, splitting voice agents into speaker and reasoner

    Vapi has opened its GPT-Live beta to every Vapi customer, after a limited beta last month with OpenAI's full-duplex speech-to-speech model. On Vapi the model runs as a speaker that handles the whole call and delegates lookups or actions to a separate reasoner model, with the handoff controlled through two prompts instead of one. Existing phone numbers, tools, tests and observability carry over, the transcriber config is dropped, and the voice switches to one of OpenAI's 22.

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.

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.

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.

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.