For the first time, developers can also instruct the text-to-speech model to speak in a specific way—for example, “talk like a sympathetic customer service agent”—unlocking a new level of customization for voice agents.
The paper introduces a validation‑gated audit framework for voice AI customer‑care systems, treating them as stateful, multi‑turn, tool‑mediated interactions where bias and safety can manifest as added burdens before a final decision. The framework distinguishes between native speech‑to‑speech, cascaded ASR‑to‑LM‑to‑TTS, and hybrid architectures, and applies matched service facts across controlled caller presentation conditions to validate fact invariance, presentation cues, artifacts, and acoustic measurements. It outlines seven validation gates, a six‑family metric set, and demonstrates the approach with a synthetic refund‑dispute audit example, while noting that production results are withheld until the protocol is satisfied.
By Vignesh Ethiraj, Ashwath David
arXiv:2607. 21180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances have introduced speech-to-speech (S2S) conversational assistants capable of producing natural-sounding interactions, including non-verbal cues like tonality and mood.
By Gregor Endler, Sebastian Kraus, Lukas Stappen
arXiv:2608.28518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We investigate whether automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors in user input can lead to unsafe outputs from Embodied AI (EAI) models. We find that...
By Sihan Jia, Oliver Lemon
We’re sharing lessons from a small scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.
Voxtral TTS: A frontier, open-weights text-to-speech model that’s fast, instantly adaptable, and produces lifelike speech for voice agents.