hotwirednews Install bot

Week 21

18–24 May 20262026-W21 · 6 filings · 6 companies · 2 net-new

The Connect layer led the week with 2 of 6 filings, from Daily / Pipecat and Voice Elements.

Speaktext-to-speech1

RimeModel providermodel release2026-05-19

Rime ships Coda dual-decoder TTS for conversational agents

Conversational dual-decoder design plus on-prem serving targets the reliability gap Rime says still kills agent demos at concurrency — Podonos vs ElevenLabs is vendor-hosted, treat as unverified.

Details1 source

Rime released Coda, a dual-decoder autoregressive TTS aimed at high-stakes conversational voice agents, with jointly trained semantic and acoustic decoders, a custom TIGERSTRIPE serving stack, and on-prem delivery like prior Rime models.

Coda TTS

Announcement

ThinkLLMs, speech-to-speech1

StepFunModel providermodel release2026-05-24net-new

StepFun ships StepAudio 2.5 Realtime end-to-end voice LLM

End-to-end audio-in/audio-out with persona RLHF is StepFun's bid against cascade stacks in CN/EN — public consent/licensing detail for training voices is still thin.

Also SpeakHear

Details2 sources

StepFun released StepAudio 2.5 Realtime, an end-to-end Chinese/English speech LLM with persona RLHF, paralinguistic comprehension (vendor score 82.18), and WebSocket access at wss://api.stepfun.com/v1/realtime as step-2.5-realtime.

StepAudio 2.5 Realtime

Announcementplatform.stepfun.ai

Orchestrateframeworks, evals1

SonioxModel providerAPI2026-05-19

Soniox STT and TTS land natively in LiveKit Agents

One vendor for both ears and mouth inside LiveKit Agents cuts the usual two-dashboard STT/TTS mismatch on language coverage — useful before the June v5 model refresh.

Also HearSpeak

Details1 source

Soniox made its full speech stack — real-time STT and TTS across 60+ languages — available as native LiveKit Agents plugins via livekit-agents[soniox], so one API key covers both sides of an AgentSession.

Soniox STT and TTS LiveKit plugins · vendor LiveKit

Announcement

Connecttelephony, channels2

Daily / PipecatPlatformlaunch2026-05-22

Daily ships event JSON raw-tracks defaults and animated cloud compositor

Post-call reconstruction gets meeting events and gapless audio by default from 26 May 2026, and live cloud composites can match offline VCS renders with 30fps layout animations.

Also Show

Details1 source

Daily upgraded raw-tracks and cloud recording with default event JSON, gapless audio transcodes, and a VCSRender compositor with layout animations, becoming account defaults on 26 May 2026.

Daily recording (raw-tracks + compositor)

Announcement
Voice ElementsPlatformlaunch2026-05-20

Voice Elements launches Voice Nexus for OpenAI Realtime phones

Telephony CPaaS turns existing DIDs into OpenAI Realtime agents without a greenfield stack — $0.05/min all-in on the Voice Elements hop, model usage billed separately.

Also OrchestrateUse

Details1 source

Voice Elements released Voice Nexus Service, connecting DIDs and WebRTC endpoints on its cloud platform to OpenAI gpt-realtime and gpt-realtime-mini agents with per-call webhook config, CRM/MCP tools, transfers, and outbound campaigns at $0.05/min plus OpenAI usage.

Voice Nexus Service · vendor OpenAI

Announcement

Useagents in market1

HyroPlatformpartnership2026-05-20net-new

Hyro plugs healthcare AI agents into Five9 contact centres

Vertical patient-access voice agents on a major CCaaS rail — shortens the path from Five9 shops to Hyro scheduling/triage agents.

Also Connect

Details3 sources

Hyro joined Five9’s AI Agent Connect as an accredited healthcare ISV so health systems can deploy Hyro voice agents for prescription management, triage, and scheduling inside Five9 with integration cut to about one hour.

AI Agents × Five9 · vendor Five9

Announcementhyro.aix.com