speech-to-speech

Block's AI lab released Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model trained only on human conversation audio. It runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, according to MarkTechPost.

Block announced Dessa, a speech-to-speech AI model it says was trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation." The team says it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max "or better," and early access will go to a small group of AI safety researchers.

ElevenLabs released two speech-to-speech models, Eleven Realtime v1 Max and v1 Mini, on October 20, 2026. Max scores 98.8% on Big Bench Audio with a 0.57-second response time, according to the company. Both are available through the ElevenAgents platform and an OpenAI-compatible Realtime API.

AWS has published a reference architecture for a voice travel concierge that pairs Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic with Bedrock AgentCore runtime, AgentCore Gateway over MCP, and Bedrock Knowledge Bases. It deploys with a single AWS CDK script and runs against a sample airline backend with synthetic data. The post does not disclose pricing, context window, or benchmark figures for Nova 2.5 Sonic.

Google DeepMind has released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two voice-dialogue models that reason and execute background tasks without interrupting conversation. Google claims the Extended Thinking model ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis' Speech to Speech Quality Index with a score of 82.6.

NVIDIA has released NemotronLabs VoiceChat 11B, an 11-billion-parameter end-to-end full-duplex speech model that unifies streaming speech understanding and generation in one architecture. The model claims to be the first open full-duplex system to support live tool calling during natural conversation, with ~450ms turn-taking latency.

Loka built a conversational voice agent using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic that achieved 87.0% speech reasoning accuracy on Big Bench Audio, surpassing GPT Realtime at 83.0% and Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio at 71.0%. The system delivers Time to First Audio of 1.39 seconds at approximately $0.27 per hour of input audio.

Google announced Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, a speech-to-speech translation model supporting over 70 languages with continuous audio generation. The model rolls out today to Google Translate on Android and iOS, with Google Meet integration coming in private preview this month for select Workspace customers.

Amazon has released an open-source testing framework for Nova Sonic voice agents that automates multi-turn conversation evaluation without requiring human testers. The harness uses LLM-as-judge techniques to assess voice agents across six metrics including goal achievement, response accuracy, and tool usage, addressing a critical QA bottleneck in voice AI development.

AWS has integrated WebRTC protocol support with Amazon Nova Sonic, its speech-to-speech model, through Amazon Kinesis Video Streams. The integration delivers real-time voice streaming with sub-second latency and includes adaptive bitrate control, forward error correction, and Voice Activity Detection for mobile and IoT applications.

Amazon Web Services released technical guidance for migrating text agents to voice assistants using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, a native speech-to-speech model that combines automatic speech recognition, reasoning, tool calling, and text-to-speech in a single bidirectional streaming interface. The model supports asynchronous tool calling and built-in voice activity detection for handling interruptions.