BotCast #013 is out: Ricardo Herreros Symons, Chief Revenue & Strategy Officer at @Speechmatics and part of its founding team.
His lesson for builders: benchmarks are great, but "always, always, always test with your own data."
Full episode + transcript in the reply 👇
Watch the full episode + read the transcript: voiceaispace.com/industry-co…
On YouTube: youtu.be/84FFIIEB3uU
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
I built an iOS Gym app that counts my reps and corrects my stance.
It runs offline and generates audio on the go on my phone. No API costs.
This way, I can focus purely on my breathwork and not worry about counting reps or technique.
Built this with Phonon.
Open-source on-device TTS model from @GradiumAI
A new frontier for on-device speech.
We're open-sourcing Phonon, a suite of TTS models under 50m parameters, setting a new standard for naturalness and accuracy across languages, with the broadest inference support to date.
Phonon-31m is available under Apache 2.0.
gradium.ai/phonon🧵
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
A new frontier for on-device speech.
We're open-sourcing Phonon, a suite of TTS models under 50m parameters, setting a new standard for naturalness and accuracy across languages, with the broadest inference support to date.
Phonon-31m is available under Apache 2.0.
gradium.ai/phonon🧵
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
Today, we're announcing Jo.
Now, you can get your work done through voice.
Jo an open source, local, private, AI assistant. Jo clears your inbox, schedules meetings, and handles follow-ups, all while your phone stays in your pocket.
I started using Jo when I stopped enjoying fundraising. Zoom calls are awkward.
Where do you look? How do you smile? How do you prevent yourself from looking at you?
One day, my friend suggested I do fundraising calls over the phone, and I never looked back.
That's where the idea for Jo came about.
A tool where you can get your work done with voice.
I've used Jo to do work on a run, on a jog, commuting, doing yoga, cooking, folding laundry, and every situation in between.
And yes, it's local, secure, and private. We don't see any of your data or the tool calls themselves. And if you select local-first models, none of the data leaves your phone.
We spent the last couple of months building and refining, testing with users and iterating on Jo, and we would love you to try it out.
We are nowhere near perfect, but we hope we're good enough, fast enough, local enough, and private enough to spark some inspiration.
You can either download the app, or you can directly load it onto your phone. Both are linked below. We've added a skill file inside of our repo to let Claude or ChatGPT know how best to install it.
Try it out, push it to its limits, and let me know what you think.
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
Okay, Hermes making phone calls is unreal.
Hermes doesn't have to wait for you to check in anymore. It can just call you.
A new plugin in the Hermes catalog, hermes-whatsapp-voice, gives Hermes live voice calls over regular WhatsApp. No business account needed.
What that looks like:
▸ It rings you when something actually needs you, like an urgent reminder or a scheduled morning check-in
▸ You can call it back and have it handle things mid-call
▸ When you hang up, a recap lands in your WhatsApp chat
▸ It can only ring your number. Nobody else's
Notifications pile up and get swiped away. A ringing phone gets answered.
It's community-built and runs on an unofficial WhatsApp connection, so set it up on a spare number.
Voice AI, Week 42:
• @SpaceXSI Grok Voice 3.0 at $0.08/min
• @FishAudio Drama 3, open weights
• @OpenAI prompt-to-voice in GPT-Live
• @Speechmatics Oak, medical ASR
• Mosi raises RMB 1B+
• Japan's actors union sets AI voice rules
Full roundup 👇
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
Here is a 6 minute call within JOSIE-Voice on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro using: Qwen-3 0.6B TTS/ASR 4bit and Deepseek 4.1 Flash on ollama cloud. it does 100+ Tool calls with agentic work in the real world. No cuts or speedup's.
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
Voice agents can talk with you one-on-one.
But can they join a group conversation? Not yet!
(1/4)
In MP-Bench (#EMNLP2026), 12 voice agents are no better than a coin flip at knowing when to speak, unless they're called by name. 🧵
🎙️ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗢𝗧𝗖𝗔𝗦𝗧 Episode 12 is out 🥳
Please meet James Zammit, co-founder of Roark (YC W25) and the winner of The Voice AI Space Blabla Award 2025 🤪 (he won it by giving the best speech at our London event some time ago).
Other than winning a WTF prize, James and his co-founder Daniel Gauci Mizzi make sure voice agents don't go coucou, and that if they do, you catch them and improve them.
In this episode he answers our usual 5 questions: who he is, how he got there, his joy and pain, the lessons worth sharing, and where the industry goes in 12 months and in 5 years.
Full episode + transcript in the reply 👇
Watch the full episode + read the transcript: voiceaispace.com/industry-co…
On YouTube: youtu.be/lLrsNKnIGQs
Thibault | T-Bot retweeted
I turned @googlegemma EmbeddingGemma 2, an embedding model, into a speech-to-text model, and it turned out to be one of the fastest STT models you can run on device.
On a base M3 MacBook Air it transcribes an hour of audio in about 13 seconds: 288× real time.
The idea came in March with Gemini Embedding 2. It puts text, images, audio and video into one shared space, so a spoken word lands right next to the written word. If that's true, you should be able to read a transcript straight out of the embedding model. I couldnt tried it then, but last week EmbeddingGemma 2 came out as an open model, so I tried it.
Voice AI this week (Week 41, Oct 5-11):
@awscloud made Nova 2.5 Sonic generally available
@HeyGen launched its first in-house TTS model
@deepgramai took Nova-3 Medical to 10 languages
@TIIuae released Falcon-ASR for Emirati Arabic
@sierraplatform launched fleming-1, which detects AI callers
@hume_ai launched Expression APIs
@sesame gave its voice agents their own computers
@nvidia added 8-speaker diarization to Speech NIM
@telnyx AI Assistants can now fall back to backup transcription models
@AutomationAnywh agreed to buy Boost.ai
@elevenlabs says it will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in India
Full roundup with every source 👇
Full Week 41 roundup on X: xitter.cf/voiceaispace/status/21…
With all sources on Voice AI Space: voiceaispace.com/news/voice-…
If you look on YouTube for #VoiceAI educational videos, you'll mostly find lead magnets for paid Skool communities, or affiliate marketing hidden behind tutorials. We just made a series of videos explaining the key concepts:
Voice AI Fundamentals, 21 short videos 👇
10 new products just landed in the Voice AI Space Library:
Even Realities G2 by @EvenRealities
↳ camera-free display glasses with live transcripts and translation.
Lokutor
↳ voice agents that run on CPUs, 4 to 5 cents a minute all-in.
Adalat AI
↳ real-time speech transcription for Indian courtrooms.
Kejue
↳ Arabic-first voice agents for enterprises.
Deepslate
↳ European speech-to-speech model for real-time voice agents.
Zenarate
↳ AI roleplay training for contact center teams.
@credgenics
↳ voicebot for debt collection in 8+ languages.
Josh.ai
↳ privacy-focused voice control for the smart home.
Home Assistant Voice by @home_assistant
↳ open-source voice assistant speaker, local or cloud.
Nuance Audio
↳ hearing glasses that bring nearby voices forward.
BotCast #011 is out: Tom Waszkowycz, co-founder & CTO at Inkling, an AI tutor that talks with students voice-to-voice.
"After you ask a question, you need to give them five, ten seconds to engage their brain."
Full episode + transcript in the reply 👇
Watch the full episode + read the transcript: voiceaispace.com/industry-co…
On YouTube: youtu.be/Vgsj2T7LIp8















