hotwirednews Install bot

Week 23

1–7 Jun 20262026-W23 · 10 filings · 9 companies · 6 net-new

The Speak layer led the week with 4 of 10 filings, from Boson AI, Vapi, Microsoft and EqualyzAI.

Hearspeech-to-text3

Ringg AIModel providermodel release2026-06-05net-new

Ringg ships Parrot STT for Hindi-English voice agents

Hindi-heavy, code-mixed phone audio is where generic STT still breaks agent actions — Ringg prices on transcript received and claims sub-100 ms compute latency on that path.

Details2 sources

Ringg AI released Parrot STT V1 for real-time voice agents, targeting noisy, code-mixed Hindi-English calls with vendor-claimed ~60 ms compute latency, normalised WER of 7.27 on open Hindi benches versus 8.94 ElevenLabs and 12.36 Deepgram, and transcript-based pricing.

Parrot STT V1

Announcementringg.ai
NVIDIAModel providermodel release2026-06-04

NVIDIA opens Nemotron 3.5 ASR for multilingual streaming transcription

Open multilingual streaming STT with an 80ms–1.12s latency dial, and Daily’s voice-agent bench placing it on the latency/accuracy frontier for builders who need self-hosted transcription.

Details2 sources

NVIDIA released open-weight Nemotron 3.5 ASR (0.6B), a multilingual streaming speech-to-text model covering about 40 language-locales with configurable chunk latency from 80ms.

Nemotron 3.5 ASR

Announcementdaily.co
MicrosoftModel providermodel release2026-06-02

Microsoft ships MAI-Transcribe-1.5 across 43 languages

Pairs with MAI-Voice-2 on the same day for a Foundry hear+speak stack — keyword biasing and long-file speed are the enterprise hooks, with streaming still on the roadmap.

Details1 source

Microsoft launched MAI-Transcribe-1.5 in Foundry with coverage expanded from 25 to 43 languages, vendor-claimed best-in-class FLEURS WER, 2.4% WER and #3 on Artificial Analysis, keyword biasing (up to 30% relative WER cut on FLEURS), and hour-of-audio transcription in under 15 seconds.

MAI-Transcribe-1.5

Announcement

Speaktext-to-speech4

Boson AIModel providermodel release2026-06-04

Boson AI serves Higgs Audio v3 TTS on SGLang-Omni

Open serving path for a controllable multilingual agent TTS — tags in the text stream plus a shared multi-stage runtime, not another closed API-only drop.

Also Orchestrate

Details2 sources

Boson AI and the SGLang-Omni team announced end-to-end serving for Higgs Audio v3 TTS: a ~4B streaming conversational TTS covering 100 languages with inline emotion/style/prosody/SFX tags, zero-shot cloning, and open cookbook deploy via sgl-omni.

Higgs Audio v3 TTS on SGLang-Omni

Announcementhuggingface.co
VapiPlatformpartnership2026-06-03net-new

Vapi makes Grok Voice the default for core platform voices

Distribution deal, not a new model card — Grok becomes the path of least resistance on one of the largest voice-agent platforms.

Also Orchestrate

Details1 source

xAI and Vapi announced that Grok Voice became the default TTS engine for Vapi's 12 core voices, following a Vapi blind evaluation that ranked Grok first, covering the installed base of voice agents on the platform.

Grok Voice as default TTS · vendor xAI

Announcement
MicrosoftModel providermodel release2026-06-02

Microsoft ships MAI-Voice-2 multilingual expressive TTS

Puts in-house Microsoft TTS into Foundry and Contact Center with emotion tags and consent-gated cloning — 72% preference over Voice-1 on the same day as Transcribe-1.5.

Details1 source

Microsoft launched MAI-Voice-2 in Foundry, expanding from English-only to 15+ languages/locales with emotion tags, 5–60 s zero-shot voice prompting with consent guardrails, code-switching for Hindi–English and Spanish–English, and a 72% preference win over MAI-Voice-1.

MAI-Voice-2

Announcement
EqualyzAIModel providerlaunch2026-06-02net-new

EqualyzAI VoiceMaker ships African-language TTS, STT, and developer SDKs

First dated 2026 Equalyz product ship in the corpus; prior Forbes Africa piece was profile-only.

Also Hear

Details4 sources

EqualyzAI's VoiceMaker platform for Nigerian-language TTS, multilingual transcription, and voice cloning became available with Terms effective 1 June 2026 and the first myvoicemaker Python SDK published 2 June 2026.

VoiceMaker

Announcementpypi.orgmyvoicemaker.aidocs.myvoicemaker.ai

Useagents in market3

FinPlatformlaunch2026-06-04net-new

Fin ships Voice 2 on Apex Flash for phone CX

CX agent vendor ships a voice-specialised model path with named resolution and latency deltas — phone automation framed as resolution rate, not demo fluency.

Also ThinkConnect

Details3 sources

Fin (formerly Intercom) launched Fin Voice 2 on its Apex Flash model with over 20 phone-ops updates, claiming 24.5% higher resolution and 0.43 s faster responses, plus identity verification, refunds, appointments, proactive outbound, and richer call insights.

Fin Voice 2 (Apex Flash)

Announcementfin.aicxtoday.com
VonagePlatformpartnership2026-06-03net-new

Vonage embeds vertical AI agents for healthcare, FS, and retail in VCC

Vertical-trained agents land natively inside VCC on 3 June — Avaamo for healthcare and Syndeo for FS/retail — so operators skip custom telephony glue for those three industries.

Also Connect

Details1 source

Vonage launched industry-specific AI agents inside Vonage Contact Center through partnerships with Avaamo for healthcare and Syndeo for financial services and retail, with context-preserving handoff to live agents.

Vertical AI Agents (VCC + Avaamo / Syndeo) · vendor Avaamo / Syndeo

Announcement
BroadvoicePlatformlaunch2026-06-02net-new

Broadvoice launches GoEngage S2S voice agent on GoContact

CCaaS vendor ships native S2S inbound handling plus a supervisor analyst agent on the same GoContact console — less bolt-on bot SKU, more platform AI.

Also ConnectThink

Details1 source

Broadvoice released GoEngage, a speech-to-speech inbound voice agent on GoContact that processes audio directly rather than a cascade IVR path, plus AI Analyst for plain-language contact-centre performance questions, both generally available to GoContact customers.

GoEngage and AI Analyst

Announcement