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Cartesia launches Managed Agents voice agent platform: #1 of 30 on Speech Agent Arena, $0.03 per minute at launch

Voice model company Cartesia launched Managed Agents on Oct 29, an end-to-end voice agent platform for enterprise phone calls that tunes its own speech-to-text and text-to-speech models together with the agent harness, and bundles telephony, knowledge bases, tool calls and outbound batches. Cartesia says it ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena with a 1115 Elo and scores 87.4% accuracy and 90.7% experience on ServiceNow's EVA-Bench (vendor-reported, with GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model). Launch pricing is 50% off at $0.03 per minute.

Cartesia launches Managed Agents voice agent platform: #1 of 30 on Speech Agent Arena, $0.03 per minute at launch

Key Takeaways

  • On Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena blind preference test, Managed Agents ranks #1 of 30 agents with a 1115 Elo, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Minimal (1099), Grok Voice 3.0 (1064) and GPT-Live-1 (1041) (Cartesia blog, as cited by the vendor)
  • First-attempt results on ServiceNow EVA-Bench across 200+ customer service, IT service and HR scenarios: 87.4% accuracy and 90.7% experience, versus 73.7%/71.2% for Grok Voice 3.0 and 59.0%/61.6% for GPT Realtime 2.1 (EVA-Bench)
  • All these benchmark runs use GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model; Cartesia's internal evaluation says 85% of calls had no turn-taking issues, versus 67% for other agents
  • Launch pricing is 50% off at $0.03 per minute; Cartesia says the platform has already handled tens of millions of conversations in finance, retail, hospitality and healthcare
  • It supports 44 languages; English, Spanish, Hindi, French and Japanese can switch mid-call today, with the rest coming soon
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Mistral launches the Voxtral 3 speech model family and a voice agent SDK: transcription in 50+ languages, TTS at $13 per 1M characters, EU-hosted or self-deployed

On Oct 20 Mistral released Voxtral 3: the Voxtral Small/Mini Transcribe 3 speech-to-text models, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3, the Voxtral Mini TTS 3 (Voxtral Speech 3) text-to-speech model, and a LiveKit-based voice agent SDK that streams listening, reasoning with tool calls, and speaking as one pipeline, with each turn completing in under a second per Mistral. Transcription covers 50+ languages with diarization and context biasing; TTS covers 35+ languages and 50+ dialects, plus Pro Voice cloning from 30 minutes of audio. It is live on the Mistral API (EU, US and global endpoints) and can be self-deployed.

Mistral launches the Voxtral 3 speech model family and a voice agent SDK: transcription in 50+ languages, TTS at $13 per 1M characters, EU-hosted or self-deployed

Key Takeaways

  • Multilingual transcription (vendor-reported): macro WER over 45 FLEURS languages is 4.1% (language forced) / 4.0% (inferred) for Voxtral Small Transcribe 3, tied with Microsoft AI Transcribe 2 and ahead of Scribe v2 (4.9%) and Whisper large-v3 (16.0%/14.9%)
  • Diarization (vendor-reported): cpWER of 18.4% for Small and 18.6% for Mini, vs 30.9% for the previous Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and 38.4% for Gemini 3.5 Transcribe
  • Pricing: Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 is 4B parameters at $0.0035/min (docs list it as Public Preview with 32k context); Voxtral Speech 3 costs $13 per 1M characters
  • Realtime: Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 runs below 500 ms latency; in Mistral's 35-language FLEURS chart the 480 ms setting scores 6.4% WER, still behind Gemini 3.5 Realtime Transcribe at 4.2%
  • The voice agent SDK is built on LiveKit with SIP telephony and WebRTC; each stage (LLM, voice, language) is swappable, and Pro Voice clones a voice from 30 minutes of audio
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Voxtral Small Transcribe 3⚡ Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3⚡ Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3⚡ Voxtral Mini TTS 3🤖 Voxtral voice agent SDK🌐 Mistral AI🌐 LiveKit

Google introduces Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking

Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. The audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call. They are available through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio.

Key Takeaways

  • Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. The audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call. They are available through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio.
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Google introduces Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking

Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call to reduce latency and cost. They are available in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Key Takeaways

  • Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call to reduce latency and cost. They are available in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
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Linked Models & Agents:
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xAI ships Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0: ~2× accuracy, $0.10/hr batch, AA streaming #1

SpaceXAI (xAI) launched Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0, claiming roughly 2× the accuracy of Transcribe 1.0 on customer-support calls, spoken credentials, and short voice commands at the same price. It ranks #1 for accuracy among 32 streaming transcription models on Artificial Analysis; short-phrase WER fell from about 20.6% to 6.8%. Features include streaming and batch modes, automatic language detection with mid-recording language switches, word-level timestamps and confidence, free speaker diarization, batch at about $0.10/hour and realtime streaming at about $0.20/hour, with existing Speech-to-Text API clients upgraded without code changes.

Key Takeaways

  • Claims ~2× accuracy vs Transcribe 1.0 on support calls, spoken credentials, and short commands at the same price.
  • #1 accuracy among 32 AA streaming transcription models; short-phrase WER ~20.6%→6.8%.
  • Batch ~$0.10/hr and streaming ~$0.20/hr, with diarization, language switching, word timestamps; existing API clients upgrade in place.
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Grok Voice Transcribe 2🌐 xAI

Meta ships Muse Voice Transcribe: real-time multilingual ASR with 20+ speaker diarization

Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Voice Transcribe on September 1, its first real-time audio perception model: streaming ASR, diarization for 20+ speakers, and endpointing, with native code-switching, 70+ training languages (25 validated at launch), and hour-plus sessions. Meta says it ranks first on Artificial Analysis streaming speech-to-text as of September 1. It already powers Meta AI for Mac (hold Fn to dictate anywhere) and Muse Code, and is on the Meta Model API at $3 per 1,000 audio-minutes (~$0.18/hour).

Key Takeaways

  • Streaming ASR, diarization, and endpointing ship as one model without a post-process chain
  • Already live for system-wide Mac dictation and Muse Code; developers use the Meta Model API
  • API pricing is about $0.18/hour; adaptive delay trades latency for harder words
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Muse Voice Transcribe⚡ Muse Spark🤖 muse-code🌐 Meta AI

Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for High-Precision Multilingual Speech-to-Text

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, an intelligent speech-to-text model designed for clean and structured audio transcription across 85+ languages, now live in Antigravity and AI Studio.

Key Takeaways

  • Significantly improved entity recovery for phone numbers, postal codes, and code snippets in noisy audio;
  • Intelligent filler word removal, automated formatting, and custom dictionary support across 85+ languages;
  • Day-0 availability in macOS Gemini app, Android Gboard, and developer platforms including Antigravity.
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Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 3.5 Transcribe: 4.0% Streaming WER, Screen-Aware Dictation in Antigravity

Google DeepMind launched Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, its most precise speech-to-text model for intelligent voice interactions. Artificial Analysis reports 4.0% streaming WER and 2.6% non-streaming WER, with 85+ languages and screen-aware dictation in Antigravity that grounds filenames, variables, and agent thoughts.

Key Takeaways

  • 4.0% streaming WER and 2.6% non-streaming WER; ~70% faster time-to-final-transcription vs Chirp 3, with 5.50% FLEURS streaming WER
  • Live API model gemini-3.5-transcribe-live for sub-second bidirectional streaming; Interactions API gemini-3.5-transcribe adds speaker attribution and word-level timestamps
  • Live in Google AI Studio, Antigravity with screen/chat grounding, Gemini on macOS, and Gboard Rambler; custom vocabulary plus auto-detect for 85+ languages
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