Higgsfield AI just introduced Higgsfield Speak, a new tool built to create motion-driven talking videos quickly. Users pick a style, select an avatar, and type in a script, while the platform automatically generates cinematic motion, voiceover, and facial emotion.
Voice AI startups raised $2.1 billion last year, an eightfold spike according to CB Insights. Fueled by real-time breakthroughs from OpenAI and ElevenLabs, full-duplex agents are cheap enough and realistic enough to take over drive-thrus, clinics, and call centers where callers can barely spot the bot.
Epic Games just revealed plans to let creators build voice-interactive AI NPCs inside Fortnite, following the massive success of its AI Darth Vader. Creators will get access to the same safety guardrails Epic used to keep Vader from going rogue, with live demos showing dynamic voice conversations. Why it matters: Bringing unscripted, talking agents into custom worlds could turn static game maps into living playgrounds.
Google just rolled out public link sharing for NotebookLM, letting anyone browse and interact with your curated notebooks via a single URL. Viewers can ask questions and listen to generated Audio Overviews without touching source files. For now, it is limited to personal accounts.
Wispr Flow just launched an iOS app that functions as a system keyboard, letting you voice-type inside any app across more than 100 languages. It learns custom vocabulary, works in poor network conditions, and even picks up quiet whispers. Users get 2,000 words free per week, with an unlimited tier priced at $12 a month.
AI phone support startup Phonely just teamed up with Maitai and chipmaker Groq to slash voice bot response times by over 70%, pushing time-to-first-token down to 176 milliseconds. The system hit 99.2% accuracy across iterations, and over 70% of callers now can't tell it's a machine—prompting one client to swap out 350 human agents this month.
ElevenLabs just added Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 to its Conversational AI platform to fix the trade-off between speed and deep reasoning in voice bots. The model brings tighter instruction following, long-context memory, and reliable tool calling to real-time speech. Developers can pick it from their dashboard and deploy with a single line of HTML.
ElevenLabs just added true text and voice multimodality to its Conversational AI platform. Agents can now process spoken audio and typed text at the same time, letting users speak naturally and switch to text when spelling out tricky info like emails or card numbers. It is a smart fix for pure-voice transcription headaches.
Hume AI just launched EVI 3, its third-generation end-to-end speech-language model that lets users generate custom voices and personalities using simple prompts. It streams responses with conversational latency while tapping into reasoning and web search systems. In blind tests, it outranked GPT-4o on empathy, expressiveness, and audio quality.
ElevenLabs just launched Batch Calling for its Conversational AI platform, allowing businesses to blast out hundreds of concurrent outbound calls with voice agents. Teams can upload contact spreadsheets, inject dynamic variables like names or order IDs, and route calls via Twilio or SIP trunking. It basically automates call center outreach at scale.
Anthropic just rolled out a beta Voice mode for its Claude mobile apps, powered by the new Sonnet 4 model. The feature supports five voice personalities with real-time transcription and Google Workspace integration for paid tiers. Why it matters: Anthropic was the last major holdout without voice, shifting the assistant battle to execution and latency.
Shopify just rolled out an AI store builder that lets merchants generate an entire storefront from a single prompt, alongside a new AI-integrated theme called Horizon. Its commerce assistant Sidekick also picked up voice chat, screen sharing, and mobile app support. Why it matters: Merchants can now bypass coding entirely to spin up and tweak storefronts on the fly.
Google just rolled out major upgrades to its Gemini 2.5 lineup, introducing an experimental Deep Think reasoning mode for 2.5 Pro that tackles complex math and coding by exploring multiple hypotheses. The update also adds native multi-speaker audio dialogue, Project Mariner computer use in API, and native MCP support.
Google just announced at I/O 2025 that NotebookLM will soon turn raw notes, PDFs, and images into digestible visual presentations via Video Overviews. It's also adding adjustable length to Audio Overviews, following the launch of dedicated iOS and Android apps with offline support.
Google just launched the official NotebookLM mobile app on iOS and Android. You can now download Audio Overviews for offline background playback, tap Join to steer the hosts, and share webpages, PDFs, or YouTube clips straight into notebooks from any app. It turns your research into a truly portable podcast.
Acer Gadget just unveiled two new AI-powered wearables at Computex 2025: the titanium FreeSense Ring for health tracking with zero subscription fees, and AI TransBuds for two-way translation across 15 languages. Remarkably, only one person needs to wear the earbuds to hold a conversation.
Google just rolled out a suite of AI accessibility updates across Android and Chrome for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. TalkBack now lets blind and low-vision users ask Gemini questions about any image or their entire screen, while Expressive Captions can detect word elongation and sound effects like whistling. It turns basic transcription into genuine contextual comprehension.
Microsoft just started rolling out a "Hey, Copilot" hands-free wake word to Windows Insiders. As long as your PC is unlocked, you can start a voice chat without touching a keyboard or mouse. The wake word detection runs locally on-device and is opt-in, but it's currently English-only.
Notion just rolled out an AI meeting notetaker that listens via system audio to transcribe calls and generate structured summaries while you take notes alongside it. Currently live on Mac via the "/meet" command across dozens of languages, the update also brings enterprise search and an AI research mode.
Spotify just updated its AI DJ feature to support voice commands, letting users request specific songs, switch genres, or change the playlist vibe just by speaking. Currently available in English across more than 60 markets for Premium subscribers, the update turns the passive commentary DJ into a two-way interactive selector.
