Search “Speech”

ElevenLabs partners with adELA to provide free voice restoration to ALS patients in Spain

ElevenLabs announced a partnership with the Spanish ALS association adELA to give ALS patients diagnosed in Spain free access to its voice restoration and preservation technology. This is the first project of the ElevenLabs Impact Program in Spain, and Spain is also the first country to offer this technology through a nationwide patient association. Patients whose voices have not yet changed noticeably can record new samples; those whose voices have already changed can upload old recordings to generate their own digital voice. It is estimated that there are about 4,000–4,500 ALS patients in Spain, many of whom will eventually lose the ability to speak.

Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa

Block's AI research lab has released the full-duplex speech model Dessa, opening a waitlist as a research preview. According to MarkTechPost, the model was trained only on human voice conversation audio, without using text or pretrained models, and can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, faster than real time; training used one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 (72 GPUs). No benchmark scores, parameter count, weights, paper, or API have been released so far.

Databricks launches voice Agent solution and open-sources DIVA blueprint

On October 29, 2026, Databricks launched a voice agent solution and open-sourced the DIVA blueprint as the starting point for the next scenario. The solution emphasizes that the value of voice agents lies not in being able to converse, but in combining context, ontology, and governed data to understand callers in real time and execute rules. Its prototype uses LiveKit to carry calls, Deepgram for speech-to-text and default voice, and ElevenLabs to provide expressive voice, and can hand calls over to a human. The agent runs where the customer's data resides, connecting to order, loyalty, and CRM systems through read-only queries. Currently, the solution uses the DIVA blueprint as the starting point for subsequent scenarios.

ElevenLabs partners with adELA to provide free voice restoration to ALS patients in Spain

ElevenLabs announced a partnership with the Spanish ALS association adELA to give ALS patients diagnosed in Spain free access to its voice restoration and preservation technology. This is the first project of the ElevenLabs Impact Program in Spain, and Spain is also the first country to offer this technology through a nationwide patient association. Patients whose voices have not yet changed noticeably can record new samples; those whose voices have already changed can upload old recordings to generate their own digital voice. It is estimated that there are about 4,000–4,500 ALS patients in Spain, many of whom will eventually lose the ability to speak.

View story:ElevenLabs partners with adELA to provide free voice restoration to ALS patients in Spain

Artificial Analysis evaluates Cartesia Managed Agents voice agent

Artificial Analysis evaluated Cartesia's fully managed voice agent solution, Cartesia Managed Agents, on the Speech Agent Arena. The solution achieved an Elo of 1115, 98 points higher than the previous Cartesia Line (1017), with task success rate rising from 77.5% to 91.7%. The platform runs in a cascade around a developer-selected LLM using Cartesia's in-house Ink speech-to-text and Sonic text-to-speech models; this evaluation used GPT-5.5 and the two voices Skylar and Daniel. On agent tasks requiring tool calls, the Elo was 1112. There are currently no further developments.

Artificial Analysis evaluates Cartesia Managed Agents voice Agent

Artificial Analysis evaluated Cartesia's fully managed voice agent solution, Cartesia Managed Agents, on the Speech Agent Arena. The solution achieved an Elo of 1115, 98 points higher than the previous Cartesia Line (1017), with task success rate rising from 77.5% to 91.7%. The platform runs in a cascade around a developer-selected LLM using Cartesia's in-house Ink speech-to-text and Sonic text-to-speech models; this evaluation used GPT-5.5 and the two voices Skylar and Daniel. On agent tasks requiring tool calls, the Elo was 1112. There are currently no further developments.

View story:Artificial Analysis evaluates Cartesia Managed Agents voice agent

ElevenLabs Conducts Shopper Research on Retail AI Voice Agents

ElevenLabs conducted three studies with shoppers in the UK, US and several other countries to examine shoppers' preferences for interacting with retail AI voice agents. The research shows that when shoppers were first asked to actually use an ElevenLabs voice agent before answering, nearly half chose "speak and listen to a reply," about 30% chose "speak and read text on screen," and voice ranked first across all six shopping tasks; among respondents who had not tried it, typing preferences led voice by more than 4:1. The research also found that the more serious the problem, the less willing shoppers were to hand it over to an agent, with only 34% choosing an agent in an erroneous charge scenario; if an agent fails once, 61% want to be transferred to a human.

Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa

Block's AI research lab has released the full-duplex speech model Dessa, opening a waitlist as a research preview. According to MarkTechPost, the model was trained only on human voice conversation audio, without using text or pretrained models, and can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, faster than real time; training used one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 (72 GPUs). No benchmark scores, parameter count, weights, paper, or API have been released so far.

View story:Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa

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.

Databricks launches voice Agent solution and open-sources DIVA blueprint

On October 29, 2026, Databricks launched a voice agent solution and open-sourced the DIVA blueprint as the starting point for the next scenario. The solution emphasizes that the value of voice agents lies not in being able to converse, but in combining context, ontology, and governed data to understand callers in real time and execute rules. Its prototype uses LiveKit to carry calls, Deepgram for speech-to-text and default voice, and ElevenLabs to provide expressive voice, and can hand calls over to a human. The agent runs where the customer's data resides, connecting to order, loyalty, and CRM systems through read-only queries. Currently, the solution uses the DIVA blueprint as the starting point for subsequent scenarios.

View story:Databricks launches voice Agent solution and open-sources DIVA blueprint

ElevenLabs conducts research on shoppers using retail AI voice agents

ElevenLabs conducted three studies with shoppers in the UK, US and several other countries to examine shoppers' preferences for interacting with retail AI voice agents. The research shows that when shoppers were first asked to actually use an ElevenLabs voice agent before answering, nearly half chose "speak and listen to a reply," about 30% chose "speak and read text on screen," and voice ranked first across all six shopping tasks; among respondents who had not tried it, typing preferences led voice by more than 4:1. The research also found that the more serious the problem, the less willing shoppers were to hand it over to an agent, with only 34% choosing an agent in an erroneous charge scenario; if an agent fails once, 61% want to be transferred to a human.

View story:ElevenLabs Conducts Shopper Research on Retail AI Voice Agents

Ollama launches speech model Phonon, supporting text-to-speech

Ollama launched its speech model Phonon on October 24, 2026, beginning support for text-to-speech. According to the Ollama Blog, Phonon is a series of small text-to-speech models from Gradium, currently available on macOS, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. On a MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Ollama uses MLX acceleration to run 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime, with word error rate on par with the Hugging Face Transformers reference implementation. Phonon is compatible with OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech interface, so existing OpenAI SDK code only needs its base URL changed. On licensing, phonon is released under Apache 2.0, while the 40M model uses the CC BY-NC 4.0 license and is restricted to non-commercial use. There are currently no subsequent developments.

Ollama launches speech model Phonon

Ollama launched its speech model Phonon on October 24, 2026, beginning support for text-to-speech. According to the Ollama Blog, Phonon is a series of small text-to-speech models from Gradium, currently available on macOS, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. On a MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Ollama uses MLX acceleration to run 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime, with word error rate on par with the Hugging Face Transformers reference implementation. Phonon is compatible with OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech interface, so existing OpenAI SDK code only needs its base URL changed. On licensing, phonon is released under Apache 2.0, while the 40M model uses the CC BY-NC 4.0 license and is restricted to non-commercial use. There are currently no subsequent developments.

View story:Ollama launches speech model Phonon, supporting text-to-speech

Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa

Block's internal AI research lab released the full-duplex speech-to-speech model Dessa on October 23. According to Unite.AI, the model was trained entirely from scratch on human conversational speech, can listen and speak simultaneously, and natively perceives emotion, sarcasm, and laughter; its inference is faster than real time and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, with the team completing training on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. Block has released demo recordings and a public waitlist, and has opened early access to a small number of AI safety researchers. Other reports note that the model does not rely on a text intermediary and supports full-duplex conversation with the ability to interrupt and interject at any time, and that training consumes hundreds of times fewer tokens than large language models, but the author points out that this is currently only a small-scale research preview from Block's internal lab, the demos were selected by the company, and questions remain about how pure audio models perform on complex multi-step logical reasoning.

Block releases speech model Dessa

Block's internal AI research lab released the full-duplex speech-to-speech model Dessa on October 23. According to Unite.AI, the model was trained entirely from scratch on human conversational speech, can listen and speak simultaneously, and natively perceives emotion, sarcasm, and laughter; its inference is faster than real time and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, with the team completing training on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. Block has released demo recordings and a public waitlist, and has opened early access to a small number of AI safety researchers. Other reports note that the model does not rely on a text intermediary and supports full-duplex conversation with the ability to interrupt and interject at any time, and that training consumes hundreds of times fewer tokens than large language models, but the author points out that this is currently only a small-scale research preview from Block's internal lab, the demos were selected by the company, and questions remain about how pure audio models perform on complex multi-step logical reasoning.

View story:Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa

Voice researcher suggests families set up a safe word

Kimberly Hyun, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, suggests that family members agree on a safe word known only to each other; if you receive a call from an unknown number claiming a family member is in trouble, you should hang up immediately and call that person back to verify. Fortune reported on the case of Deborah Del Mastro, a mother in Martinez, California: in May she received a call from someone posing as a Mexican drug cartel, and the caller played an AI-cloned recording of her daughter crying and screaming. Following the instructions, she wired $5,400 to Mexico from multiple locations within five hours, only to discover afterward that her daughter had been at work the whole time. The report also noted that McAfee tests showed that a voice sample of just three seconds is enough to generate a clone that matches 85% of the original voice; a survey by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance estimated that in 2025 about 15 million American adults were scammed, with losses of about $68 billion, of which 12% involved AI or deepfakes.

Voice researcher suggests families establish a safety code word

Kimberly Hyun, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, suggests that family members agree on a safe word known only to each other; if you receive a call from an unknown number claiming a family member is in trouble, you should hang up immediately and call that person back to verify. Fortune reported on the case of Deborah Del Mastro, a mother in Martinez, California: in May she received a call from someone posing as a Mexican drug cartel, and the caller played an AI-cloned recording of her daughter crying and screaming. Following the instructions, she wired $5,400 to Mexico from multiple locations within five hours, only to discover afterward that her daughter had been at work the whole time. The report also noted that McAfee tests showed that a voice sample of just three seconds is enough to generate a clone that matches 85% of the original voice; a survey by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance estimated that in 2025 about 15 million American adults were scammed, with losses of about $68 billion, of which 12% involved AI or deepfakes.

View story:Voice researcher suggests families set up a safe word

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.