hotwirednews Install bot

Week 9

23 Feb – 1 Mar 20262026-W09 · 5 filings · 5 companies · 4 net-new

The Connect layer led the week with 2 of 5 filings, from Voice Elements and LiveKit.

Hearspeech-to-text1

ConvoZenModel providermodel release2026-02-24net-new

ConvoZen ships Akshara STT and Ragini TTS for Indian telephony

India-telephony STT/TTS with a claimed 32% average WER cut on ConvoZen's own Indic bench — useful for BFSI/healthcare on-prem, but benches are vendor-run.

Also SpeakOrchestrate

Details2 sources

ConvoZen unveiled Akshara (speech-to-text) and Ragini (text-to-speech) at its Bengaluru AI Summit: telephony-first models trained on Indian call audio for Hinglish and regional languages, with claimed lower WER versus global baselines on the company's Indic bench.

Akshara + Ragini

Announcementconvozen.ai

Speaktext-to-speech1

WonderfulPlatformpartnership2026-02-26net-new

Wonderful adds Deepdub eTTS to enterprise multilingual voice agents

Enterprise agent platform wires emotive TTS from a localisation specialist — millions-of-calls claim is Wonderful's; Deepdub is the speak layer, not a new foundation model.

Also Use

Details1 source

Wonderful and Deepdub announced a partnership integrating Deepdub's Emotive Text-to-Speech into Wonderful's enterprise AI agent platform for emotionally nuanced, multilingual customer-facing voice at production scale.

Wonderful × Deepdub eTTS · vendor Deepdub

Announcement

Orchestrateframeworks, evals1

IBMPlatformpartnership2026-02-24net-new

IBM names Deepgram first voice partner for watsonx Orchestrate

Deepgram becomes IBM's first embedded voice partner on watsonx Orchestrate on 24 February — a month before the ElevenLabs TTS/STT add, so IBM's voice stack is multi-vendor from early on.

Also HearSpeak

Details3 sources

IBM and Deepgram announced a collaboration embedding Deepgram speech-to-text and text-to-speech into watsonx Orchestrate, making Deepgram IBM's first voice partner for building voice agents and voice-enabled workflows.

watsonx Orchestrate × Deepgram · vendor Deepgram

Announcementdeepgram.combusinesswire.com

Connecttelephony, channels2

Voice ElementsPlatformlaunch2026-02-27net-new

Voice Elements adds Conversational AI Pipeline for realtime LLM telephony

Brings packet-level LLM audio streaming into an existing .NET SIP/WebRTC toolkit three months before the OpenAI Realtime-specific Voice Nexus launch.

Also Orchestrate

Details1 source

Voice Elements shipped AI Live Streaming / Conversational AI Pipeline so existing .NET telephony apps can stream caller audio to voice LLMs over SIP, WebRTC, or SMS without rewriting call flows.

Conversational AI Pipeline (AI Live Streaming)

Announcement
LiveKitPlatformlaunch2026-02-23

LiveKit Agents 1.4.3 adds sip_headers on WarmTransferTask

Telephony transfer knobs filed as connect.

Details1 source

livekit-agents 1.4.3 adds a sip_headers parameter to WarmTransferTask for SIP transfers.

livekit-agents 1.4.3

Announcement