Search “Speech”

Amazon Polly upgrades generative engine, adds 14 voices

Amazon Polly completed a generative engine upgrade on October 23, 2026. According to information released by AWS Machine Learning, this upgrade adds 14 voices, covers 9 locales, and for the first time officially offers Hindi and Finnish in the generative engine. After the upgrade, Polly offers a total of 57 generative voices, covering 11 languages and 25 locales, with service scope extended to AWS GovCloud (US-West), covering a total of 11 AWS Regions. This is an in-place upgrade; existing voice names and API calls remain unchanged, pricing remains unchanged, and users do not need to modify code. There are currently no subsequent development facts.

Sierra launches voice agent entity detail benchmark τ-Entity

On October 22, 2026, Sierra released the τ-Entity benchmark, designed to test whether voice agents can accurately capture, recognize, and correct errors in entity details such as names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The benchmark includes 200 tasks, covers ten categories of entities, and features a six-language leaderboard. According to the leaderboard, GPT Live 1 achieved a 60.3% accuracy rate in regular calls, but only 34.0% of tasks were passed under all three conditions: regular, strong noise, and strong speech. Gemini 3.8 Live and Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 had all-condition pass rates of 19.5% and 24.0%, respectively. The paper also found that prescribing a "ask—spell/repeat—confirm correction—submit" workflow can increase the all-condition success rate by 14 to 31 percentage points, at the cost of 21 to 28 extra seconds per call. There are currently no follow-up developments.

Sierra launches voice Agent entity detail benchmark 𝜏-Entity

On October 22, 2026, Sierra released the τ-Entity benchmark, designed to test whether voice agents can accurately capture, recognize, and correct errors in entity details such as names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The benchmark includes 200 tasks, covers ten categories of entities, and features a six-language leaderboard. According to the leaderboard, GPT Live 1 achieved a 60.3% accuracy rate in regular calls, but only 34.0% of tasks were passed under all three conditions: regular, strong noise, and strong speech. Gemini 3.8 Live and Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 had all-condition pass rates of 19.5% and 24.0%, respectively. The paper also found that prescribing a "ask—spell/repeat—confirm correction—submit" workflow can increase the all-condition success rate by 14 to 31 percentage points, at the cost of 21 to 28 extra seconds per call. There are currently no follow-up developments.

View story:Sierra launches voice agent entity detail benchmark τ-Entity

MiniMax showcases M3.1 Flash and SGLang Omni voice agent combination

MiniMax showcased a solution combining M3.1 Flash with SGLang Omni for interactive voice agents. According to its introduction, M3.1 Flash provides fast, concise response capabilities, while SGLang Omni supplements streaming output, dialogue state, and interruption handling, enabling the voice agent to be interrupted, corrected, and redirected in real time. A developer replaced the local LLM in the original Qwen3-ASR→Qwen3 LLM→Qwen3-TTS pipeline with the M3.1 Flash API, keeping the rest of the pipeline unchanged, and measured fast responses with concise, direct answers. Currently, this combination is still in the showcase and developer trial stage, with no further progress disclosed.

MiniMax showcases M3.1 Flash and SGLang Omni voice agent combination

MiniMax showcased a solution combining M3.1 Flash with SGLang Omni for interactive voice agents. According to its introduction, M3.1 Flash provides fast, concise response capabilities, while SGLang Omni supplements streaming output, dialogue state, and interruption handling, enabling the voice agent to be interrupted, corrected, and redirected in real time. A developer replaced the local LLM in the original Qwen3-ASR→Qwen3 LLM→Qwen3-TTS pipeline with the M3.1 Flash API, keeping the rest of the pipeline unchanged, and measured fast responses with concise, direct answers. Currently, this combination is still in the showcase and developer trial stage, with no further progress disclosed.

View story:MiniMax showcases M3.1 Flash and SGLang Omni voice agent combination

HeyGen releases speech model Voice Turbo

HeyGen releases speech model HeyGen Voice Turbo. Artificial Analysis reported on October 22, 2026 that the model ranked first in the controlled speech TTS arena with an Elo of 1,202, surpassing the previous generation HeyGen Voice's 1,196 and Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus's 1,185. The arena evaluated using the same set of 8 cloned voices (4 American, 4 British), and HeyGen Voice Turbo ranked first among 46 models and ranked first in the Assistants and Entertainment categories. The report also stated its price is 4 USD per million characters, the lowest on the list, 7.5 times cheaper than the previous generation HeyGen Voice's 30 USD per million characters. There are currently no subsequent development facts.

HeyGen releases voice model Voice Turbo

HeyGen releases speech model HeyGen Voice Turbo. Artificial Analysis reported on October 22, 2026 that the model ranked first in the controlled speech TTS arena with an Elo of 1,202, surpassing the previous generation HeyGen Voice's 1,196 and Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus's 1,185. The arena evaluated using the same set of 8 cloned voices (4 American, 4 British), and HeyGen Voice Turbo ranked first among 46 models and ranked first in the Assistants and Entertainment categories. The report also stated its price is 4 USD per million characters, the lowest on the list, 7.5 times cheaper than the previous generation HeyGen Voice's 30 USD per million characters. There are currently no subsequent development facts.

View story:HeyGen releases speech model Voice Turbo

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Ethan Mollick suggests voice interfaces could end or worsen open-plan offices

Ethan Mollick put forward a judgment: voice interfaces in AI applications may finally be able to end the "monster" that is the open-plan office, or they may simply make it worse. Citing his own research, he pointed out that multiple experiments show that background noise in open-plan offices reduces the ability to do analytical work, increases software bugs, and weakens the ability to find bugs. This judgment was published on October 21, 2026, and there are currently no subsequent developments.

Matt Turck says open-source voice AI welcomes a small on-device SOTA TTS model suite

Matt Turck reposted and commented that a small on-device SOTA text-to-speech model suite has emerged in the open-source voice AI space. According to related reports, Gradium has open-sourced the Phonon on-device speech synthesis model suite, with all model parameters under 50m, focusing on multilingual naturalness and accuracy, and claiming to offer the broadest inference support to date; among them, Phonon-31m is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Currently, this news has been reposted by Matt Turck, with no further developments yet.

Matt Turck says open-source voice AI welcomes a small on-device SOTA TTS model suite

Matt Turck reposted and commented that a small on-device SOTA text-to-speech model suite has emerged in the open-source voice AI space. According to related reports, Gradium has open-sourced the Phonon on-device speech synthesis model suite, with all model parameters under 50m, focusing on multilingual naturalness and accuracy, and claiming to offer the broadest inference support to date; among them, Phonon-31m is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Currently, this news has been reposted by Matt Turck, with no further developments yet.

View story:Matt Turck says open-source voice AI welcomes a small on-device SOTA TTS model suite

HeyGen Professional Voice Clone is trained on 30 minutes to 2 hours of recorded audio

HeyGen has launched Professional Voice Clone, which is trained using 30 minutes to 2 hours of recorded audio. Related reports point out that this amount of data is key: short reference clips cannot capture the breathing rhythm before a long sentence or the accent features when speech speeds up, and these subtle irregularities are exactly what listeners use to judge whether a voice belongs to a real person. The reports also say that the clone preserves breathing, pauses, laughter, accent, and vowel pronunciation; HeyGen states that no one can tell the clone's result apart from the person themselves. Currently, this fact is supported only by this one report, with no subsequent developments.

Ethan Mollick suggests voice interfaces may end or worsen open-plan offices

Ethan Mollick put forward a judgment: voice interfaces in AI applications may finally be able to end the "monster" that is the open-plan office, or they may simply make it worse. Citing his own research, he pointed out that multiple experiments show that background noise in open-plan offices reduces the ability to do analytical work, increases software bugs, and weakens the ability to find bugs. This judgment was published on October 21, 2026, and there are currently no subsequent developments.

View story:Ethan Mollick suggests voice interfaces could end or worsen open-plan offices

ElevenLabs launches real-time speech translation model Eleven Realtime Translation

ElevenLabs launches the real-time speech translation model Eleven Realtime Translation, currently available in alpha form to ElevenAPI enterprise customers. The model uses the low-latency speech model Eleven v4 Turbo by default, supports more than 90 languages and automatic language detection, keeps the same voice consistent across languages, and can be selected from a library of more than 17,500 voices or a self-built voice clone. Teams can adjust the translation startup speed, trading off between high-quality translation and low latency for complex calls. Deutsche Telekom has already built new call features based on ElevenLabs in the Magenta AI Call Assistant.

ElevenLabs launches real-time speech translation model Eleven Realtime Translation

ElevenLabs launches the real-time speech translation model Eleven Realtime Translation, currently available in alpha form to ElevenAPI enterprise customers. The model uses the low-latency speech model Eleven v4 Turbo by default, supports more than 90 languages and automatic language detection, keeps the same voice consistent across languages, and can be selected from a library of more than 17,500 voices or a self-built voice clone. Teams can adjust the translation startup speed, trading off between high-quality translation and low latency for complex calls. Deutsche Telekom has already built new call features based on ElevenLabs in the Magenta AI Call Assistant.

View story:ElevenLabs launches real-time speech translation model Eleven Realtime Translation

ElevenLabs releases the Eleven Realtime v1 speech-to-speech model

On October 20, 2026, ElevenLabs released the Eleven Realtime series of speech-to-speech models, comprising v1 Mini for low-cost natural conversation and v1 Max for complex tasks. According to the ElevenLabs blog, both support more than 90 languages and can access its over 17,000 voices; an independent evaluation by Artificial Analysis shows that v1 Max answered 98.8% of Big Bench Audio speech reasoning questions correctly and began speaking in an average of 0.57 seconds, while v1 Mini scored 75.9% and 0.62 seconds, respectively. The API is compatible with the OpenAI Realtime API, so existing integrations need only change the endpoint and model name, and models can also be selected directly for deployment in ElevenAgents. On October 22, Zhidongxi reported that the two models currently support only WebSocket connections; in its testing, an assistant built with Architect could modify Agent settings by voice, but the Chinese accent was noticeable, responses tended to be long, and latency was relatively high.

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ElevenLabs releases speech-to-speech model Eleven Realtime v1

On October 20, 2026, ElevenLabs released the Eleven Realtime series of speech-to-speech models, comprising v1 Mini for low-cost natural conversation and v1 Max for complex tasks. According to the ElevenLabs blog, both support more than 90 languages and can access its over 17,000 voices; an independent evaluation by Artificial Analysis shows that v1 Max answered 98.8% of Big Bench Audio speech reasoning questions correctly and began speaking in an average of 0.57 seconds, while v1 Mini scored 75.9% and 0.62 seconds, respectively. The API is compatible with the OpenAI Realtime API, so existing integrations need only change the endpoint and model name, and models can also be selected directly for deployment in ElevenAgents. On October 22, Zhidongxi reported that the two models currently support only WebSocket connections; in its testing, an assistant built with Architect could modify Agent settings by voice, but the Chinese accent was noticeable, responses tended to be long, and latency was relatively high.

View story:ElevenLabs releases the Eleven Realtime v1 speech-to-speech model