The Speak layer led the week with 3 of 11 filings, from LiveKit, ElevenLabs and Bland AI.
Qwen3-ASR and STT context hints. Class-2: folded quiet patch(es) 1.6.2, 1.6.5, 1.6.6 into this row.
livekit-agents 1.6.9 adds Baseten Qwen3-ASR STT, OpenAI STT context hints, and Google credentials objects on STT/TTS.
livekit-agents 1.6.9
Puts a ~0.1B-LM multilingual ASR stack on phone/ONNX paths months before Edge0's streaming Infinite card (`2026-09-23-edge0-audio8-asr-infinite`) — vendor Open ASR mean WER 7.03 and ~200 MB iOS peak claim, CC-BY-NC-4.0 weights.
Edge0 released Audio8-ASR-0.1B, a compact autoregressive multilingual ASR model with about 0.1B language-model parameters for English, Chinese, Cantonese, French, German, Japanese, and Korean, plus ONNX Runtime and iOS Apple Neural Engine deployment builds.
Audio8-ASR-0.1B
Meet Audio8-ASR-0.1B.Small model. Full-scale capability.
https://x.com/SamuelZengML/status/2085321310067134527
Large TTS provider wave in one cluster.
livekit-agents 1.6.9 adds Deepgram Flux TTS (v2/speak), a Bland TTS plugin, Baseten Qwen3-TTS, and Fish Audio quality-guard on all TTS requests.
livekit-agents 1.6.9
Studio dubbing as an API call across 90+ languages, with delivery conditioned on the original performance.
ElevenLabs opened Dubbing v2 on the API so developers can embed performance-preserving dubbing across 90+ languages.
Dubbing v2
Dubbing v2 is now available on ElevenAPI, enabling developers to embed AI dubbing directly into their products and workflows.
https://x.com/ElevenLabs/status/2085383576959197680
Phone-conversation training set plus a named Audio Realism bench. After starter credits, $0.015 / 1,000 characters.
Bland launched Speech v3, a TTS trained on 100M+ real phone conversations, claiming second place to real humans on Design Arena Audio Realism.
Bland Speech v3
Full-duplex S2S with OpenAI Realtime drop-in at sub-$0.02/min audio-out — Boson's first filed realtime agent model after the TTS/avatar line.
Also Speak
Boson AI launched Higgs Realtime, an audio-native speech-to-speech model and OpenAI-Realtime-compatible API with ~700 ms speech-in to speech-out, 100+ languages, and metered rates of $0.0023/min in and $0.014/min out.
Higgs Realtime
Decouples Telnyx voice agents from PSTN while keeping Mission Control assistant definitions; complements same-day Edge Compute filing.
Also OrchestrateConnect
Telnyx opened a direct WebSocket conversation endpoint for AI Assistants so clients can stream PCM16 audio and receive transcripts, assistant audio, and tool-call events without a phone number or PSTN hop.
Voice AI WebSocket conversations
Brand voice is a control on the agent platform here, rather than a TTS dropdown in another vendor’s console.
Also Speak
Sierra launched Voice Personas so one agent can carry brand-specific personality, pacing, interruption behaviour, and mid-call voice or language switching, available on Sierra that day.
Voice Personas
Read more about Voice Personas here:
https://x.com/SierraPlatform/status/2085791255590793274
CPaaS vendor closes the gap between telephony and agent runtime; comparable connect+orchestrate move to Twilio Agent Connect-class ships.
Also Connect
Telnyx made Edge Compute generally available so agent code, state, inference, speech, and telephony can run on one Telnyx network with under-200ms round-trip targets.
Edge Compute
A national used-car retailer on inbound sales voice is a US enterprise proof point next to SoftBank’s Japan channel deal, and it still arrived via a trade-press write-up.
CarMax said Sierra voice agents have been live on inbound sales calls since May, answering hours and availability questions and handing off to associates; appointment scheduling is next.
Inbound sales voice agents (Sierra) · vendor Sierra
Second major 2026 Hyro platform wire after Five9 — voice agents into enterprise IT/ops workflows, not only patient scheduling.
Also ConnectOrchestrate
Hyro partnered with ServiceNow so health systems can reach ServiceNow Healthcare Operations workflows over Hyro voice and digital agents, starting with employee FAQs, conversational ticket management, and IT desk voice ticket intake via a ServiceNow Store app.
AI Agents × ServiceNow Healthcare Operations · vendor ServiceNow