Voice is the new computer interface. It makes technology disappear and creates magical experiences. To all my coworkers who spent years listening to me talking to my computer. This is it. It’s your turn now.

Gemini Voice really is a cut above. It’s incredible. Coming to GBrain and your OpenClaw/Hermes shortly

It’s official, Gemini Live 2.5 voice agent is the best It’s smart, it’s fast, it has large enough context Coming to GBrain Voice shortly

When your voice agent debugs your slides live @charlierguo is using gpt-realtime-1.5

people keep saying...

ChatGPT is now available in CarPlay. The voice mode you know, now available on-the-go. Rolling out to iPhone users running iOS 26.4 where CarPlay is supported.

Kelsey Plum becomes the first female pro athlete to launch a verified AI “digital twin” that fans can voice call to interact with her, per @FastCompany “It’s where we are in society… I think you’re either gonna get with it or get lost.”

aqua voice for ios 03.01.2026

*on a first date* her: "so what do you do for fun?" me: "i have outsourced my entire life to AI agents"

NVIDIA just dropped PersonaPlex-7B 🤯 A full-duplex voice model that listens and talks at the same time. No pauses. No turn-taking. Real conversation. 100% open source. Free. Voice AI just leveled up. huggingface.co/nvidia/person…

Today, we're announcing significant new traction in our voice AI research and development partnerships. Over the past few months, we’ve quietly been expanding our focus on providing frontier voice AI training data to research labs looking to imbue emotion understanding and cutting edge expressivity into their foundation models. We believe some of the most exciting possibilities for deeper speech and emotion understanding will come to fruition this year. By training today’s frontier models to understand the nuances voice interaction—rife with subtle tones of frustration or satisfaction, “aha” moments, chuckles, sighs, backchannels, and interruptions—we believe that labs will unlock new possibilities for voice AI to become a primary interface within many applications. In our experience working with leading research labs and AI-first enterprises, a consistent pattern we’ve seen is a greater need for high-quality datasets and evaluation pipelines than for new algorithms or architectures. Researchers spend up to 80% of their time curating the data they need to diagnose model issues, fix failure modes, and improve model behavior. That’s why Hume is now focused on building the data and evaluation infrastructure needed to train next-generation voice models across industry.  With the right training, we hope that deeper voice understanding and empathy can be translated not just into more efficient interfaces but into better alignment of AI with human well-being. Read more below hume.ai/blog/data-blog-jan

We just crossed 200k monthly users on Tolan, a voice-first AI companion that we’ve worked closely with our friends at OpenAI to bring life to. Here’s what we learned building it:

Voice AI is going to explode in 2026. Here’s what I’m seeing: 1. Dictation has completely changed how I work I go on walks where I dictate to Otter for 40min. I built an app this weekend while lifting weights. The productivity gain is real. 2. Phone booths everywhere I visited the offices of two large AI companies last week. They have phone booths everywhere. I watched someone walk into one, dictate, then walk right back out. That’s it. 3. Microphones at every desk I visited Wispr Flow’s headquarters in October (see pic). Every single employee had a $60 microphone on their desk and can whisper tasks all day long to AI. You cannot hear them even if you’re at the neighboring table. 4. OpenAI says typing is the bottleneck Alexander Embiricos, head of product for Codex, just went on the @lennysan podcast that the “current underappreciated limiting factor” to AGI-level productivity isn’t model capability, it’s human typing speed. We are literally being held back by our fingers.

Voice AI just got a massive upgrade! 🚀 Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model allows you to build more natural live voice agents 🤖 Improvements include: - Improved function calling - 90% adherence to complex instructions - Cohesive, multi-turn conversations PLUS: We're launching Live Speech Translation beta in Google Translate (real-time, style-preserving translation in your headphones for 70 languages) 🤯 @GoogleAIStudio @googleaidevs

ElevenLabs has raised more than $300 million in all, soaring to a $6.6 billion valuation in October to become one of Europe’s most valuable startups. Full story: forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/… 📸: Cody Pickens for Forbes

Announcing Gradium. After 10 years of pushing audio research at Meta, Google and Kyutai, I'm joining the start-up arena with my day 1s to take our models from the lab to every voice product out there. Game on.

Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have teamed with AI audio company ElevenLabs to produce AI replications of their famous voices. "To everyone building with voice technology: keep going. You’re helping create a future where we can look up from our screens and connect through something as timeless as humanity itself — our voices," McConaughey says. wp.me/pc8uak-1lGxoB

have been doing more voice prompts for this reason, it can be inhibiting to have type and explain a lot of information

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski's AI voice agent predictions: - Everyone will have an authenticated digital voice agent for tasks like booking restaurants or confirming appointments - You'll be able to tailor the accent, tone, and style to your preferences - Businesses will be able to customize what voice each customer and region hears Source: @elevenlabs CEO @matiii speaking with @siliconvalleymm on the Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Building in realtime voice? See the difference in action 👇🏻