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Nov 15Sun
  1. MarkTechPost58

    Bland Launches Tofu-1, a Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Model for Calls

    Bland, the San Francisco voice-AI company, has released Tofu-1, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model in research preview that targets calls from moving cars, hospital rooms and weak-signal lines, listening while it speaks and reasoning while it talks. Bland lists speaker tracking, noise separation and paralinguistics as its audio skills, and says callers can interrupt or correct it mid-sentence while it keeps the conversation moving and reports results only when work is done. Access is a closed enterprise research preview for banking, healthcare, insurance and government, with Bland citing January availability and no published size, latency, pricing or benchmarks.

  2. Hacker News AI18

    Beau – An AI boyfriend app focused on everyday conversations

    Beau is an AI boyfriend app offering text and voice conversations with six AI companions (Elio, Arjun, Theo, Kai, Rafael and Daniel), with memory of details users share that can be viewed and deleted. It includes real voice calls and voice notes, romance stories, gifts, and free daily chat with an optional Beau+ subscription and Petals credits. The app states chats are never sold or used for ads, and it is described as for companionship and fun, not medical, legal or financial advice.

  3. Hacker News AI34

    Hacked 2013 Recon Jet sports glasses into a Linux camera/voice AI assistant

    A developer revived a barely-used 2013 Recon Jet (TI OMAP4430, 1 GiB RAM, 8 GB eMMC, 428x240 Kopin microdisplay) by replacing its dead battery, then used Claude Code to root it, port mainline Linux 6.18 with drivers for display, touchpad, camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, IMU and more, and build a voice-driven AI assistant. The assistant runs an on-device agent harness while vision, speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis call remote APIs on a homelab llama-swap server, with a "Heya, Jet!" wake word and a cranky-NPC persona using a cloned voice. The author notes the AI's world model lacked spatial coherence and that Claude excelled at low-level reverse engineering but failed at architectural hygiene.

  4. Hacker News AI20

    Show HN: YVD – Generate videos, images, and music in seconds with AI

    YVD AI Studio is a Show HN project for generating short AI videos from a photo or text prompt, with users choosing a model and reviewing a credit quote before generating. Free accounts receive 10 credits every 24 hours that expire after 24 hours, and images, videos and music share the account balance. The site also offers photo-to-video effect tools and guidance on using outputs for YouTube Shorts and commercial work.

Nov 14Sat
  1. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Open source TTS vs paid APIs: How to choose wisely

    This article compares open source and paid text-to-speech APIs, noting that both can produce high-quality speech and that the choice depends on team capacity and workload scale. It explains that self-hosting offers control and data sovereignty at the cost of infrastructure and engineering overhead, while managed APIs provide turnkey, scalable access with per-character pricing. It also distinguishes open weight from open source models, covers licensing considerations, and offers criteria for evaluating voice quality, latency, reliability, and total cost of ownership.

  2. AWS Machine Learning Blog22

    Cost-optimizing AssemblyAI speech-to-text inference on AWS with Amazon EC2 Spot

    AssemblyAI runs GPU-based speech-to-text inference on Amazon ECS using a mix of EC2 Spot and On-Demand Instances across g4dn, g5, and g6 GPU families, with an Amazon SQS-based retry mechanism that returns in-flight jobs to the queue when a Spot Instance receives a 2-minute interruption notice. The architecture is deployed independently in us-west-2 and eu-west-2 for data residency, and AssemblyAI reports 70 percent cost savings on inference compute compared to On-Demand pricing while maintaining SLA commitments.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog24

    Oxford spent years studying how women build companies. Now this research can speak.

    Oxford Saïd Business School's Inspiring Female Founders initiative has turned its interview research into SOFIA for Business, a voice agent built on ElevenAgents and supported by the ElevenLabs Impact Program, launched at the Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Forum. SOFIA lets founders learn from previously interviewed women and also interviews new founders itself, adding each consented conversation to the research. It was co-founded by Pinar Ozcan, Amanda Slavin and Arabella Nyffenegger, with ElevenLabs providing free tool access through its Impact Program × Professors.

Nov 13Fri
  1. The Decoder67

    Meta's Muse now calls businesses for you, but many companies might just hang up on the AI

    Meta's AI agent Muse can now place calls to US businesses on behalf of users, available to all paying Muse subscribers in the US after a September test. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said the agent, with more than 10 million users, handles calls to cable companies, the DMV and restaurants, and will soon get a free email address. Many businesses hang up when they detect an AI on the line, which forced Meta to temporarily test human operators for Muse in September, echoing Google's Duplex experience where one in four launch calls was handled by a human.

  2. TechCrunch · AI58

    ElevenLabs’ new app combines meeting note-taking and dictation for teams

    ElevenLabs released an experimental app called ElevenAI, currently in preview with sign-up required for early access, that combines meeting note-taking, dictation in over 90 languages, and agent integration. It can take notes across meetings, notify participants of recording, let users query data across meetings, and allow companies to integrate ElevenAgent for follow-up actions such as drafting emails from notes. The company also launched its v3 series of Scribe speech-to-text models with live transcription and fine-tuning on companies' own data.

  3. Apple Newsroom74

    Apple HomeView available today

    Apple announced that HomeView, a device that recognizes up to six people by face and shows their personal content in Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders, and Find My, is available to order today in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the U.S. for $299 (U.S.), with a wall-mounted version also at $299. It runs Siri AI, which offers onscreen awareness and, when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad, personal context and cross-app actions; Siri AI is available in beta in HomeView software version 27.2. HomeView is not for sale in the European Union because Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU, and Schneider Home mounts start at $59.95 (U.S.).

    Why it matters: The announcement details pricing, availability, and Siri AI features for a new Apple device, useful for readers tracking Apple's home products and regional AI rollout.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog22

    7 customer service skills every human and AI agent needs (with examples)

    This guide outlines seven customer service skills—communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, empathy, adaptability, personalization, and product knowledge—and explains how both human and AI agents apply each, citing a Zendesk study that more than 50% of customers switched to competitors after a single bad experience. It describes implementation steps including defining CX goals, choosing an agentic AI platform, architecting the agent workflow, and testing before deployment, and notes Gartner's projection that at least 70% of customers will start their customer journey using an AI interface by 2028. It also covers training and feedback through metrics such as CSAT, first contact resolution, and average handle time, and distinguishes hard from soft skills.

  5. MarkTechPost52

    Liquid AI Releases LiquidCodec, a 74M-Parameter Streaming Audio Codec

    Liquid AI released LiquidCodec, a ~74M-parameter streaming speech tokenizer used in its LFM3-Audio-2B and LFM3-Omni-2B models, which converts 24 kHz audio into 12 token streams at 12.5 Hz frames and back. Liquid AI reports best ViSQOL and lowest mel distance on all 8 test sets versus X-Codec 2, NanoCodec and Mimi, with encode RTF 0.0028 and decode RTF 0.0115 on a single CPU thread, though NanoCodec scored higher PESQ (WB) on 7 of 8 sets. Weights are on Hugging Face, with Q4_0, Q4_K_M and Q8_0 GGUF builds for llama.cpp.

  6. TechCrunch · AI58

    Muse can now place calls to US businesses — if you pay

    Meta's consumer AI agent Muse can now place calls to U.S. businesses on behalf of users, but the feature is limited to paid subscribers after an initial September test. Muse subscriptions start at $20 per month for 500 million tokens per week, with a $100 per month tier offering 3 billion tokens. Meta Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said the feature could handle calls people don't want to make, such as to cable companies, the DMV, or restaurants without online reservations.

Nov 12Thu
  1. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenLabs brings free voice restoration to veterans, songwriters, and more patients

    ElevenLabs announced at its New York Summit that people with permanent voice loss can now get free access to ElevenMusic, launching with Songwriters of North America (SONA) to verify eligibility and distribute access. The company also named Wounded Warrior Project as an Impact Program partner and NYU Langone Health as a new 1 Million Voices partner, through which eligible patients can access free personalized voice restoration via Rusk Rehabilitation. The 1 Million Voices program, a $1 billion in-kind commitment, has already helped more than 11,000 people with conditions including ALS, MND, and head and neck cancer speak again in a voice that sounds like their own.

  2. The Decoder64

    ElevenLabs Scribe v3 Live uses conversational context to stop voice agents from cutting off callers mid-sentence

    ElevenLabs released Scribe v3 for pre-recorded audio and Scribe v3 Live for low-latency real-time use, both available through the ElevenAPI and ElevenAgents platform. The company says Scribe v3 cuts word errors by about 25 percent versus its predecessor across 102 languages, while Artificial Analysis benchmarks confirm top-tier accuracy but note slower speed and mid-pack pricing. Scribe v3 Live analyzes conversational context alongside the audio signal to detect when a speaker has actually finished, and both models support preloaded specialized terms, natural-language formatting rules, and mid-sentence language switching.

  3. Hacker News AI58

    DeepL unveils Aure, its most lifelike Voice AI translation model yet

    DeepL announced Aure, a new Voice AI model powering DeepL Voice that continuously adapts translated speech to reflect shifts in tone, emotion, emphasis and pace, building on the company's earlier voice preservation technology. Aure analyzes incoming speech continuously using both translated words and source audio, and DeepL says it combined training techniques separating voice identity, prosody and spoken content with reinforcement learning. The capabilities apply automatically across DeepL Voice for Online Meetings, In-Person Conversations and the DeepL API for Voice, initially supporting English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Korean.

  4. Hacker News AI12

    Show HN: Nova Buddy AI – a friendly AI assistant for everyday people

    Nova Buddy AI is a browser-based everyday AI assistant that answers questions, drafts text and helps plan tasks, with no app install required and no sign-up needed to start. It offers five chat personalities, optional custom "Avatar AIs," and a Buddy memory feature for Buddy Plus subscribers, with a free tier of 50 messages a day and paid plans at $4.99 CAD/month or $79.99 CAD lifetime. The post also describes a Christmas promotion with free holiday tools and an advent calendar opening December 1.

  5. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Voice cloning for content creators: Scale your content workflows with voice AI

    This guide explains how voice cloning turns a recorded voice sample into a digital replica that can narrate new scripts for videos, podcasts, courses, and social clips, covering the capture-modeling-generation process and the difference between Instant and Professional Voice Cloning. It lists criteria for choosing a tool—voice fidelity, delivery control, language coverage, consent safeguards, export options, and commercial licensing—and outlines workflows for podcasters, YouTube, short-form content, courses, and audio articles. It also describes ElevenLabs' consent confirmation, voice verification, restricted voices, and traceability safeguards, plus which plan tiers include cloning and commercial rights.

  6. Hacker News AI58

    Swatters are using AI voices to deceive 911 dispatchers, and it's getting worse

    NPR reports that swatting hoax calls, such as an August bomb threat to Wheatland Union High School in Yuba County, Calif., are increasingly using AI-generated voices that sound natural and are hard for dispatchers to detect. APCO and NENA, which represent 911 dispatchers, cite a June survey of 766 public safety communications professionals in which about 14% of dispatchers said they were targeted using AI tools, and they are developing training to counter the threat. Officials stress dispatchers will always treat life-threatening calls as real and send emergency resources.

  7. Vapi Blog58

    Agent Loop is here: Better voice agents, every call

    Vapi has launched Agent Loop in early access, a self-improving harness on top of its voice agent platform that builds an agent from a plain prompt, scores every call against a business goal, clusters misses into issues, drafts and tests fixes, then ships them as experiments on a slice of live traffic with automatic rollback. It relies on primitives including Simulations and Traffic Splitting (available in the dashboard now) and Goals, Call Health and Experiments (coming soon), with human approval required before any change ships. GA is planned for early next year, and Vapi is taking waitlist signups ahead of VapiCon on November 11.

  8. ElevenLabs Blog60

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA expand collaboration to bring voice agents to enterprises and governments globally

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA are expanding their partnership across models, infrastructure and sovereign deployments, with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL now available in ElevenAgents and ElevenLabs adding 15MW of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin compute. ElevenLabs models and NVIDIA infrastructure power a sovereign voice agent for Poland's national e-Health appointment system, and the companies are exploring on-device voice AI for robotics and physical AI.

    Why it matters: It shows how voice-agent stacks are being bundled with model and compute partnerships, and includes a concrete sovereign healthcare deployment with stated operational details.

  9. ElevenLabs Blog58

    Building the interaction layer for AI: Everything announced at ElevenLabs Summit NYC

    At its New York Summit, ElevenLabs announced new models, agents, and deployment options, including plans to fine-tune open-source language models and ElevenLabs voice models for businesses, a previewed Interaction Engine that manages turn-taking and selects LLMs per task, and ElevenAgents upgrades such as Memory and Routines. It also introduced ElevenAI, an app for enterprise teams that takes meeting notes and action items using Scribe v3, launched the ElevenLabs Partner Program and Marketplace, and announced an expanded NVIDIA partnership.

  10. ElevenLabs Blog22

    How enterprise clients are putting ElevenLabs AI to work

    ElevenLabs says enterprises now account for more than 55% of its revenue, with employees at nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies using its platform, which supports languages spoken natively by 5.5 billion people and 16,000 voices. The company detailed enterprise uses including Yahoo adding real-time voice to its Scout answer tool via ElevenAgents, Westgate Resorts deploying a voice agent named "Sarah" trained on 8,000 support transcripts, and KPN launching Mobiel AI for Dutch small businesses after fine-tuning raised identity-verification accuracy from roughly 50% to 90%. Other customers cited include Doppel for vishing simulations, Pocket for transcription, and Twilio integrating ElevenLabs voices into Conversation Relay.

  11. ElevenLabs Blog22

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs collaborate to take natural AI conversations to enterprise scale

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs announced an alliance combining McKinsey's industry and enterprise transformation expertise, underpinned by QuantumBlack's AI engineering, with ElevenLabs' conversational AI technology and ElevenAgents platform to help organizations prove value through initial use cases before scaling across the enterprise. Each deployment pairs multilingual conversational technology with agent design, systems integration and operating-model changes, and the companies cite KPN, the Dutch telecom company, as an early example using AI-powered solutions for customer interactions from order enquiries to technical appointment management. The alliance aims to extend beyond telecommunications to service-intensive industries such as insurance, supporting claims intake, policy servicing and everyday customer questions.

  12. ElevenLabs Blog42

    Introducing the ElevenLabs Marketplace for enterprise-ready AI applications

    ElevenLabs launched the ElevenLabs Marketplace, a curated collection of industry-specific AI and voice applications built on ElevenLabs by partners including Salesforce, IBM, NiCE, Twilio and Zendesk, spanning financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, retail and government. Enterprises can explore solutions and connect directly with the partners behind them, while ElevenLabs says it plans to let customers purchase eligible partner solutions through existing ElevenLabs commitments starting next year.

Nov 11Wed
  1. AWS Machine Learning Blog26

    Introducing usage-based pricing for Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming

    AWS announced usage-based metering for Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming inference, letting model providers report actual usage for AWS Marketplace software charges via a companion WebSocket metadata connection, while SageMaker AI endpoint infrastructure charges still apply. Deepgram is the launch partner, bringing usage-based Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech billing to AWS Marketplace. Model servers opt in with the X-Amzn-SageMaker-Metadata-Stream-Supported header and send JSON metering records with the inference.count dimension and ConsumedUnits.

  2. The Verge · AI38

    Adobe’s AI experiments let you walk around in photos and interview your characters

    At Adobe Max, Adobe announced experimental "sneak" projects including Project Screen Test, which lets you converse with and direct AI characters in an audition-like environment, and Project Sight Span, which turns flat images into navigable 3D scenes that restore resolution at a chosen angle. Other previews include Project Sound Bender for prompt-based sound effects adjusted on a square sound canvas, and Project Rinse Repeat, which copies Photoshop edits and applies them to other subjects in a photo. Adobe says these are tech previews that may eventually reach Creative Cloud or Firefly, with a theme of making complex editing, filmmaking and audio workflows more accessible and intuitive.

  3. The Decoder58

    DeepL wants real-time translation to finally capture sarcasm and mood shifts

    DeepL's new Aure model for DeepL Voice transfers tone, emotion, emphasis, and speaking pace from the original speaker into the target language by continuously analyzing both the translated text and original audio, unlike the earlier approach that used a static voice sample. Reinforcement learning keeps accents out of the output, and Aure runs automatically in DeepL Voice for Online Meetings, In-Person Conversations, and the DeepL API, launching with support for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean. The article also notes DeepL's earlier voice preservation rollout in September, its May restructuring that cut about 250 jobs, its acquisition of the Mixhalo team, and Block's Dessa speech model for detecting emotions and sarcasm.

  4. Hacker News AI58

    Lokey – A native Android keyboard with local AI for prediction, autocorrection

    Lokey is a native Kotlin Android keyboard that runs word prediction, autocorrection, dictation and translation models locally on the phone, without an account, subscription or inference service connection. It supports 39 languages and eleven keyboard families, with optional models including LFM 2.5 350M, Qwen 3.5 0.8B, Parakeet v3 and Qwen3 ASR, downloaded separately from the app. It requires Android 9 or later on an ARM64 device, is beta software, and is released under the MIT license with third-party runtimes and model weights under their own licenses.

  5. Hacker News AI38

    AI companion that matches humans

    Kindred is an AI companion app for private text or voice conversations that, if users enable matching, detects broad themes and feelings in those conversations and notifies them when someone with something in common is found, with both parties able to join a shared room under pseudonyms. It also offers Memory and Chapters, which carry selected context between saved conversations, and a W Folder for keeping positive moments. Voice conversations use GPT-Live by OpenAI and text chats use GPT-5.6 Luna by OpenAI, and the app is available on the App Store with a demo.

  6. MarkTechPost62

    Fish Audio Releases Live 3, a Full-Duplex Voice Model That Reacts in 186 ms

    Fish Audio has released Live 3, a full-duplex voice model for real-time voice agents that keeps listening while it speaks and learns turn-taking from real human conversations rather than hand-tuned pipeline rules. Fish Audio says it can decide to respond in as little as 186 ms for short reactions like "mm-hmm," though no benchmark scores or latency distribution have been published. It is available on the Fish Agent Platform, via the Fish Audio API, and on-premises for enterprises, priced at $0.035 per minute until December 31, 2026 (then $0.07), and supports English only.

  7. ElevenLabs Blog12

    WAV vs MP3: How to choose the right audio file format

    WAV is an uncompressed, lossless format best for recording, editing and archiving, while MP3 is compressed and lossy, producing much smaller files suited to sharing and streaming. One minute of CD-quality stereo audio is about 10.6 MB as WAV, versus about 0.96 MB as a 128 kbps MP3 and about 2.4 MB as a 320 kbps MP3. Converting MP3 to WAV makes the file larger but cannot restore the data lost during compression.

  8. Hacker News AI58

    Show HN: Zeus – Claude Code for AI voice agents

    ThunderPhone v3 introduces Zeus, a fully agentic harness that configures, tests and tunes voice agents for a business's use case, replacing the retired Spark, Bolt and Storm pre-baked stacks with one unified architecture. ThunderPhone says its multi-model architecture, which runs multiple transcription models and combines faster and slower LLMs turn by turn, scores 99.4% on Big Bench Audio. Zeus is free for now, and ThunderPhone uses cost-plus pricing with margins from 17% to 25%.

  10. ElevenLabs Blog65

    Introducing Scribe v3 and v3 Live, our most accurate speech to text models

    ElevenLabs launched Scribe v3 for recorded audio, which makes 27% fewer word errors than Scribe v2 across 102 languages and has the lowest diarization error of any model tested, and Scribe v3 Live for realtime audio, which makes 43% fewer semantic word errors than Scribe v2 Realtime and adds speaker diarization and improved turn detection. Scribe v3 Live is available today in ElevenAgents, and both models are available in ElevenAPI, where switching from Scribe v2 is a one-line change to the model ID (scribe_v3 or scribe_v3_live). Both run in the US by default with isolated EU, India, and Singapore environments, Zero Retention Mode, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, and HIPAA-eligible coverage.

    Why it matters: Useful for teams choosing speech-to-text models, since it details measured accuracy, diarization, and latency trade-offs plus deployment and compliance options.

  11. Google Developers Blog72

    On-Device Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech in Google AI Edge Gallery

    Google introduced on-device ASR and TTS in Google AI Edge Gallery, pairing lightweight speech models with on-device SLMs like Gemini Nano and Gemma 4 for fully offline voice interaction. ML Kit on Android offers multilingual transcription across 100+ languages at 10x real-time speed plus a few-step diffusion TTS that starts in ~100 ms, while MediaPipe Tasks and LiteRT bring cross-platform support for open-weight models including Parakeet-TDT 0.6B, PocketTTS 100M, Kokoro-82M, and Phonon 31M. The release powers the XR Language Teacher showcase and voice-enabled AI Chat, with open-source reference code on GitHub.

    Why it matters: It documents concrete on-device speech model releases, latency and accuracy figures, and open-source code that developers can use to build offline voice pipelines.

  12. OpenRouter Announcements58

    How to Build a Voice AI Agent

    This tutorial builds a Python restaurant-booking voice agent that chains speech-to-text, an LLM with tool calling, and text-to-speech through a single OpenRouter API key, streaming each completed sentence to TTS instead of waiting for the full reply. Across 12 turns in three test conversations, median server-side time to first audio was 1.9 seconds (1.4 seconds without tools, 2.4 seconds with a tool call), and a four-turn conversation cost about $0.013 per minute of processed speech at October 8 promotional prices, with TTS accounting for roughly 90% of model cost. It also compares STT, LLM and TTS models on accuracy, latency and price, and shows how to run the same agent with LiveKit Agents for live audio and interruptions.

  13. MarkTechPost58

    Zyphra Releases ZONOS3-Mini: Open-Source TTS With 100M Active Parameters

    Zyphra has released ZONOS3-Mini, an Apache 2.0 text-to-speech model that is a sparse Mixture of Experts with 800M total and about 100M active parameters, supporting zero-shot voice cloning and word-level delivery control. It runs via WebGPU in the browser, MLX on Apple Silicon, ggml on CPU/CUDA/Metal/Vulkan, and SGLang-Omni on NVIDIA GPUs, with Zyphra reporting 80 ms median time to first audio on one H100 at 8 concurrent requests. Zyphra reports it ranks first among open models on its self-run ZTTS2-Eval Capability Index at 66.2 in speaker-embedding mode, while reference-clip mode scores only 44.7.

Nov 10Tue
  1. TechCrunch · AI58

    Meta’s AI agent Muse lands on Apple Watch and Android Wear OS

    Meta announced Monday that its Muse AI agent is now available on Apple Watch and Android's Wear OS, letting users interact with the assistant via voice calls, text messages, or dictation on their smartwatch. The launch follows a dedicated iPad app for Muse introduced a month earlier, after Muse first arrived on the App Store in September. Meta has also recently added Spaces for topic-focused conversations and U.S. video chat with a Muse avatar.

  2. TechCrunch · AI42

    Spotify’s AI DJ gets new voices, personalities, and an option for less chatter

    Spotify announced that Premium users can now customize its AI DJ with a choice of voices and personalities, including seven English options with British, American, Irish, Australian, and Indian accents and two new Spanish voices, while the original voice "X" remains available. Users can also toggle off commentary between songs so the DJ only gives brief acknowledgements when starting and stopping the feature. The new voices begin rolling out November 10 in the more than 95 markets where DJ is already supported.