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#Speech
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.

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.

September 16Wednesday
  1. 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 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.

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.

September 1Tuesday
  1. 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.

August 18Tuesday
  1. 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.

August 14Friday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    How to Choose a Conversational AI Platform for Enterprise Development

    A vendor-neutral guide lays out five criteria for picking a conversational AI platform for enterprise voice agents: developer control, model choice and fallbacks, testing and observability, the full agent lifecycle, and compliance at scale. It cites a Zapier survey of 542 US C-level executives in which 81% worried about depending on a specific AI vendor and only 6% could drop their primary vendor without disruption. The guide argues latency and orchestration matter more than feature lists, noting AssemblyAI's finding that delays past 500–700 ms feel unnatural.

August 12Wednesday
August 6Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog12

    Vapi Appoints Nathalie Criou as VP of Product

    Vapi has hired Nathalie Criou as its VP of Product, a few months after she joined the voice AI startup. Criou previously held product and general management roles at Google, VMware, Amazon, Twilio and Docker, and founded and sold the startup RidePal. She said she joined because voice is an underused channel that AI can now transform, citing customer Kavak reorganizing around voice within six months.

August 4Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    What Makes a Great Conversational AI Experience: Vapi on Voice Design

    Vapi argues that voice agents are judged on five real-time dimensions: latency, turn-taking, interruption handling, prosody, and a resilient pipeline. It cites research putting human turn gaps near 200ms and notes delays beyond roughly 500–700ms feel unnatural, while naive sequential pipelines can cost about 1.9 seconds versus 600–900ms for optimized ones. Vapi positions its model-agnostic pipeline as tunable and testable via simulated calls.

August 3Monday
  1. Vapi Blog33

    Why model flexibility matters in voice: Speechify Simba 3.2 and Fish Audio S2.1-Pro top Vapi's Humanness Index

    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.

July 27Monday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Anthropic and Vapi Webinar Q&A: How the Claude Haiku Ride-Booking Voice Agent Was Built

    Vapi published answers to questions from its webinar with Anthropic on voice AI, detailing the live ride-booking demo agent built on Vapi with Anthropic's Claude Haiku and the Layla v2 voice. The agent used five tools — estimate, book, check status, cancel and end call — plus smart endpointing and a conservative interruption threshold to reach sub-second turns. Agents running Claude on Vapi handled nearly 5M calls in the past 30 days across 50+ languages.

July 24Friday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    How to reduce customer wait times with AI voice agents

    AI voice agents cut customer wait times in two ways: removing work from the queue through self-service deflection, intelligent routing, agent assist, and demand prediction, and answering instantly with no hold. SQM Group found customers abandon calls at 2 minutes 36 seconds on average, while ContactBabel put the UK mean abandonment rate at 8.4% in 2024. Vapi says a first voice agent can be stood up from its dashboard in minutes, then measured on ASA, abandonment, and first-call resolution.

July 21Tuesday
July 13Monday
  1. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi Humanness Index: Grok TTS scores 95 and MiniMax Speech 2.5 scores 93 against a real human at 100

    Vapi's Humanness Index, a blind crowdsourced leaderboard where listeners pick which of two cloned voices sounds more human, places xAI's Grok TTS at 95 and MiniMax Speech 2.5 at 93 against a real human recording scored at 100 after more than 11,000 votes. Every battle uses the same cloned voice and script across models, and the real human recording is included in the comparison set, so a 95 means listeners chose Grok TTS at nearly the same rate as the human on the same quote. Vapi argues naturalness is no longer the bottleneck for voice agents, since callers experience the voice rather than the reasoning behind it.

July 2Thursday
June 25Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Vapi: Voice Agents That Turn High-Stakes CX Into a Competitive Advantage

    Vapi is pitching its voice AI platform as a way for brands to turn the contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, citing Amazon Ring, which evaluated over 40 voice AI vendors before going live on Vapi in two weeks and now runs 100% of its inbound CX volume through it, with improved CSAT scores. Vapi argues packaged voice solutions lock brands into vendor-controlled models and generic voices, while building from scratch is slow and costly, and it touts sub-second response times, VPC-resident architecture with zero data retention and PII scrubbing, and deployments that go live in days.

June 24Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog15

    Vapi Answers Top Questions from Its SVG Lead Qualification Webinar

    Vapi published answers to the seven most-asked questions from its webinar with Spring Venture Group, where Homer Kay described how SVG uses Vapi voice agents to qualify Medicare leads before transferring callers to licensed agents. The answers cover outbound calling compliance, API-first integrations, swapping STT, LLM and TTS components independently, human handoff, and HIPAA-eligible configurations with Zero Data Retention.

June 17Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog30

    Built for the Ear: Designing Conversations for Voice AI

    Voice AI success starts with use-case selection: tasks ending in a link, code, or number belong in chat, while urgent, hard-to-type, or emotionally loaded problems suit voice. Chat scripts must be rewritten for the ear—split long passages into single-idea turns, restate collected details like dates aloud, and limit spoken options to two or three. One staffing company cut downstream placement errors by 30% by confirming each slot as it was collected, and another team trimmed 40 seconds off average call duration by turning open questions into choices.

  2. Vapi Blog40

    How Vapi Bootstrapped 15 Homepage Voice Agents in Code

    Vapi built the 15 voice agents on its homepage — 3 use cases across 5 languages — by generating them from a single ROUGH_DRAFT.md file instead of hand-editing each in the dashboard. The four-phase framework (plan, draft, bootstrap, harden) scaffolds a TypeScript project with OpenAI gpt-4.1 at temperature 0.5, ElevenLabs and Deepgram/Soniox voice stacks, and an idempotent upsert loop that stores assistant IDs in .env.local. The repo is public: clone it, add VAPI_PRIVATE_KEY, and run bun run bootstrap.

May 21Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog20

    Vapi: Bringing Voice AI to ACCESS Chronic Care Panels

    Vapi argues that voice AI can now make voice the economically viable channel for ACCESS chronic disease management, citing Hiya data that 42% of consumers prefer voice for healthcare communication, up from 33% the prior year. The post details three production workflows, including Spring Venture Group's Medicare lead qualification agent, built by four engineers in one week, which lifted transfer-to-close rate by 3% and delivered over $5.8M in combined savings and new revenue.

May 12Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog50

    Vapi Raises $50M Series B as Its Voice Agents Pass 1 Billion Calls

    Vapi announced a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with YC, M12, Kleiner Perkins and earlier investors participating, bringing total funding to $72M. The round follows a year in which Vapi's enterprise revenue grew 10x and its voice agents crossed 1,000,000,000 calls handled. Vapi says Amazon Ring moved from evaluation to running 100% of inbound calls on its platform in two weeks, with CSAT rising.

May 5Tuesday
May 1Friday
  1. Vapi Blog34

    Open Stack vs Integrated Solution: Key Considerations for Voice AI Builders

    Vapi Blog interviews Cartesia's Iz Shalom on choosing between integrated and open modular voice AI stacks. Integrated stacks suit narrow use cases and fast proofs of concept, while open stacks fit multiple use cases, multilingual support, and swapping components. The piece urges teams to measure P99 latency in their own environment and build tight evaluations before production.

April 15Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog50

    Vapi Launches Vapi Monitoring for Production Voice Agents

    Vapi released Vapi Monitoring, a monitoring product that lets teams create customizable monitors for voice agents and get alerted when thresholds are hit. It covers effectiveness and compliance monitoring for Enterprise subscriptions, plus technical and infrastructure monitoring, and surfaces issues with affected call counts and recommended fixes.

April 14Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog18

    Vapi Product VP: Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever for Differentiated AI Products

    Vapi VP of Product Management Nathalie Criou told a HumanX panel with Salesforce, Databricks and TinyFish that AI amplifies rather than replaces fundamentals like domain expertise and judgment. She said Vapi's platform, built on millions of real-world voice interactions, develops institutional memory that a single training run cannot replicate. The panel argued shallow moats such as being first to market are eroding while trust, switching costs and unique interaction data compound faster.