Avartha: Fastest open-weight frontier voice AI beats OpenAI, Google, and xAI

Avartha announced Ava Zero, a voice agent built entirely on open models that ranks #1 on Sierra's τ³-Voice benchmark with 86.0% task completion across six languages, ahead of OpenAI's GPT Live 1 (79.9%), xAI's Grok (71.4%), and Google's Gemini (68.5%). The Georgia Tech spinout says it co-designed its inference engine and agent harness as one system, supporting up to an order of magnitude more concurrent conversations per GPU than vLLM and SGLang, and prices Ava at $2.50 per hour of conversation. Its benchmark submission combines Qwen3-ASR, Fish Audio Drama 3, GLM-5.3, and DeepSeek 4.1 Flash.