The Speak and Orchestrate layers led the week, with 2 filings each.
Gives Cartesia an STT SKU beside Sonic TTS, so agent builders can keep turn detection inside one vendor stack instead of pairing Sonic with Deepgram Flux or AssemblyAI.
Also Orchestrate
Cartesia released Ink-2, its first streaming speech-to-text model for realtime voice agents, with built-in semantic endpointing and English-only coverage at launch.
Ink-2
Speak-path cluster before the 1.7.0/blog expressive GA narrative.
livekit-agents 1.6.5 lands an early expressive mode feat plus Rime speed_alpha for Arcana/Coda and SmallestAI word timestamps.
livekit-agents 1.6.5
About $100M, Nvidia in, still no model drop. Renault is the named customer. Original stealth round was about $70M in Dec 2025.
Gradium reopened its seed to about $100M total, with Nvidia among new backers, and announced a Bay Area office expansion.
Gradium
The API SKU is the 10 Sep filing: GPT-Live-1 at $0.05/min for the voice layer.
OpenAI replaced Advanced Voice Mode defaults in ChatGPT with full-duplex GPT-Live models, with interruptions, live translation, and mid-conversation delegation to GPT-5.5-class models.
GPT-Live (ChatGPT)
Introducing GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction. Rolling out in ChatGPT starting today. You’ll want to turn the sound on for this one.
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2074907025537224840
GPT-Live is now fully rolled out to all ChatGPT users on Go, Plus, and Pro plans. Free user rollout is in progress. Update to the latest version of the ChatGPT app on iOS or Android to try it out.
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2075019750569378007
Realtime failover orchestration.
livekit-agents 1.6.5 adds a realtime model fallback adapter and streams tool call status events.
livekit-agents 1.6.5
Voice AI here is charged as training infrastructure for humans, which is a different budget line from replacing the IVR.
Cresta launched Training Simulator: AI-simulated customers built from a company’s real conversations, so human agents practice live and are graded with the same QA criteria as production calls.
Training Simulator
Cresta Training Simulator replaces scripted role-play with live, dynamic AI simulations that help human agents practice before going live.
https://x.com/cresta/status/2075206570225414290
Named travel-platform voice agent on Cognigy/CXone with vendor-stated 90% vs 71% sentiment — caveat: production started early 2026; Jul 9 is the award/case wire, not the first live call.
Also ConnectHear
NiCE recognised Tripadvisor’s Vesper at NiCE World London: an AI voice agent on Cognigy Auto Agent and CXone that handles natural-language intent capture, identity verification, containment, and human handoff.
Vesper AI Voice Agent (NiCE Cognigy) · vendor NiCE