Search “Speech”

ElevenLabs has launched synthetic voice detection in ElevenAgents, which can determine in real time whether a caller is human or AI, and supports prioritizing human callers in the queue, routing AI calls to dedicated agents for handling, while blocking sensitive operations such as password resets. Researchers have tracked 84 cases of surges in public service applications, appeals, and complaints across 11 countries, calling it "agentic flooding." The Czech Republic's national welfare and employm

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After comparing hundreds of production-grade agents running voice and chat simultaneously, ElevenLabs found that in complex conversations lasting more than two minutes, voice achieved a 32% higher success rate than text chat, and resolved issues about one-third faster when successful. In a simulated flight cancellation scenario, 85% of participants preferred voice. The research also showed that a 16% reduction in average end-to-end latency corresponded to a 26% increase in success rate, and the

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Vapi has introduced a traffic splitting feature that can allocate inbound and outbound call traffic to different versions of voice agents at ratios such as 0.1%, 1%, or 5%, before a full release once validated. The feature supports maintaining version stickiness by caller identity, and the official recommendation is to start with a two-way split, changing only one variable at a time. Previously, releasing a new version would immediately switch 100% of traffic over, so teams did not dare to itera

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Text-to-speech (TTS) works in two stages: the front end first normalizes the text and converts it into tokens and vector representations, and then the back end uses a neural model to generate acoustic representations, which are output as speech waveforms through a vocoder. In the article, ElevenLabs uses "Mr. Ríos paid $11 on 10/06" as an example to demonstrate the complete pipeline from normalization, tokenization, and prosody to the acoustic model and vocoder, and mentions that pronunciation d

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Google has begun rolling out Gemini to users in Google Maps on Apple CarPlay. A Gemini star icon appears on the right side of the navigation interface; tapping it lets users issue multi-step, open-ended commands by voice. Users can ask Gemini to recommend scenic spots, check how crowded a place is and suggest quieter times, specify routes that avoid toll roads, and report congestion and accidents while driving. The feature launches first in the United States and will expand globally in the comin

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Block, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack, has released Dessa, a speech-to-speech model trained from scratch purely on human speech, with no text and no pretrained base, supporting full duplex so it can listen and speak at the same time. The model claims inference faster than real time and can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max and above, and the entire model is said to have been trained on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. The team says its goal is to let the model understand tone and emotion, avoi

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Block has launched the full-duplex speech model Dessa, which can listen to the user's speech while speaking, and can simulate emotional expressions such as laughter, pauses, and choking up. The company says it is trained entirely on human speech data, using only a single rack of NVIDIA GPUs for training, and can run locally on MacBooks with M4 Max and higher configurations. At this stage Dessa is not open for public trial; Block is sending testing invitations to security researchers, focusing on

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Block's research lab has released the voice model Dessa, which uses a full-duplex architecture, can listen and speak at the same time, and can run locally on a MacBook M4 Max or a more powerful consumer-grade computer. The model was trained entirely on human speech and a single NVIDIA GPU, and the company says expressions such as emotion, pauses, and laughter are built into the model rather than driven by a text pipeline. Dessa is not currently publicly available, and Block is recruiting securit

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Ollama can now convert text to speech. Its first speech model is the Phonon series of small text-to-speech models from Gradium. It is currently available on macOS, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. On a MacBook Pro equipped with M5 Max, Ollama, with the help of MLX acceleration, is 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime, and its word error rate is on par with the Hugging Face Transformers reference implementation. Phonon is compatible with OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech interface, so existin

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Fortune reported that Deborah Del Mastro, a mother in Martinez, California, received a call in May from someone posing as a Mexican drug cartel; the caller played an AI-cloned recording of her daughter crying and screaming. Following instructions, she wired $5,400 to Mexico from multiple locations within five hours, only to later discover that her daughter had been at work the whole time. McAfee tests show that a mere three-second voice sample is enough to generate a clone that matches the origi

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The Amazon Audible technical team adopted controllable TTS, using natural language descriptions to control dialogue performance, enabling audiobooks to distinguish narration from dialogue and identify speaking characters. Its BookLLM achieved 97% and 94% accuracy in identifying speaking characters on 25 English and Spanish books, respectively, and the distinctiveness of character dialogue improved by 3.7 points in MUSHRA tests. In English and Spanish tests, eight of ten voices showed statistical

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Google has added Gemini voice mode to the Google Maps CarPlay version for iPhone users, callable directly starting from Maps version 26.43.1, for querying waypoints, destinations, traffic conditions, and attractions, among others. This feature was previously available on Android Auto; this rollout only states "the United States and other regions of the world" without giving a timeline. The feature is tied to a Google account and can use personal data such as conversation history to adjust answer

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AWS demonstrated a solution for hosting the Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model on Amazon SageMaker AI that lets AI agents stream-synthesize speech immediately as each sentence is generated, so playback does not have to wait for the full response to finish generating. Kokoro-82M has only 82 million parameters and can run on a single ml.g5.xlarge GPU instance; the container provides two routes, POST /invocations and WS /invocations-bidirectional-stream. The article also explains how binary WebSocket

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Sierra releases the 𝜏-Entity benchmark, using 200 tasks and ten entity categories (names, phone numbers, addresses, emails, etc.) to test whether voice agents can accurately capture, recognize, and correct detail errors. On the six-language leaderboard, GPT Live 1 leads, with 60.3% accuracy on regular calls, but only 34.0% of tasks pass under all three conditions—regular, heavy noise, and strong voice; Gemini 3.8 Live and Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 score 19.5% and 24.0%, respectively. The paper a

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Google has begun rolling out Gemini to users in Google Maps on Apple CarPlay. A Gemini star icon will appear on the right side of the navigation interface; tapping it allows users to issue multi-step, open-ended commands by voice. Users can ask about scenic spots, the current crowd levels at a location and quieter times, directly request to avoid toll roads when giving an address, and report traffic conditions such as congestion and accidents while driving. The feature launches first in the Unit

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OKA has launched Mori, a $649 mushroom-shaped home robot lamp with a built-in camera and microphone that can follow users around, play nature sounds, and guide breathing relaxation, but it does not support voice commands to control smart home devices or check the weather. Mori is powered by multiple local large language models and can judge when to interact and when to stay quiet; images and audio are discarded immediately after local processing, and facial data is stored encrypted and never upl

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HeyGen Voice Turbo ranks first in the Artificial Analysis Controlled Voice TTS Arena with an Elo of 1,202, surpassing the previous-generation HeyGen Voice at 1,196 and Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus at 1,185. The arena evaluates using the same set of 8 cloned voices (4 American, 4 British); HeyGen Voice Turbo ranks first among 46 models and ranks first in the Assistants and Entertainment categories. Its price is $4/1M characters, the lowest on the leaderboard, 7.5 times cheaper than the previous-genera

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