speech-to-speech

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and a reasoning-enhanced Extended Thinking variant for voice agents, pricing audio input at $0.005/minute versus OpenAI's $0.05/minute for GPT-Live-1. The Extended Thinking model tops the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Leaderboard with 82.6 percent.

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.