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Voice — AI news & analysis
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Every Pick Right story tagged voice — 6 articles, newest first. All news →
Google gave the AI avatar a face and didn't give it a price — that's the part to plan for
Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar went generally available in Gemini Enterprise on 24 September 2026, adding real-time lip-synced video to Google's speech-to-speech stack across 97 languages with US and EU endpoints. The audio still bills at $3/$12 per million tokens — about $0.011 a conversational minute. The video bills at nothing, because Google has not published a rate for it. HeyGen charges $0.10–$0.20 a minute for the same pixels. An unpriced line item on a GA enterprise product is a forward liability, not a discount.
Read story →Alibaba just dropped speech-to-text through the price floor — and changed the meter on the way down
Qwen-Audio-3.1 landed at the Apsara Conference on 22 September 2026 with five models and cuts of ~70% on TTS, ~85% on Realtime and up to 95% on ASR. Worked against Qwen's own 25-tokens-per-second audio rate, recognition lands near $0.016 per audio-hour — roughly a tenth of the floor Deepgram, AssemblyAI and Meta had held for years. The catch is that the meter moved from audio-seconds to tokens on the same day, two of the five models have no API yet, and the rate card is not on the international pricing page.
Read story →Google's new voice models undercut everyone — but the headline feature is unavailable in the EU, and the price doubles on 1 January
Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS on 23 September 2026 at $9 and $6 per million audio tokens, roughly a third of ElevenLabs. Both rates double on 1 January 2027, the same date the rest of the Flash line resets. Voice replication, the feature the launch leads with, is blocked in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, Illinois, Texas and India. And Google's #1 claim is measured on a benchmark built by a company whose founder now works at Google DeepMind.
Read story →GPT-Live-1 didn't just cut the price of voice — it changed the meter, and that decides which calls got cheaper
OpenAI shipped full-duplex voice to the API on 10 September at a flat $0.05 per minute, billed per second, replacing token-metered realtime pricing that ran $0.06–$0.11 a minute. Flat wall-clock billing makes dense conversations cheaper and silence expensive — the opposite of what you were optimizing for. And $0.05 is only the mouth: reasoning is a separate backend bill that swings a ten-minute call from $0.60 to $1.40.
Read story →OpenAI's GPT-Live ends turn-based voice: full-duplex ChatGPT that listens and talks at once — what's new and who gets it
OpenAI's GPT-Live (July 8) rebuilds ChatGPT Voice on a full-duplex architecture — it listens and speaks at the same time, backchannels 'mhmm,' interrupts, pauses, and decides many times a second whether to talk or listen. It delegates hard questions to a frontier model (GPT-5.5 at launch) and comes as GPT-Live-1 for paid users and GPT-Live-1 mini for free users. Here's what actually changes in day-to-day voice use, how it compares, and whether it's worth switching your voice workflow.
Read story →OpenAI ships three new realtime voice models — GA, GPT-5-class reasoning, 70-language translation
On May 7, 2026, OpenAI took the Realtime API out of beta and launched three new voice models: GPT-Realtime-2 (the first voice model with GPT-5-class reasoning), GPT-Realtime-Translate (70 input languages → 13 output languages, live), and GPT-Realtime-Whisper (streaming speech-to-text). The release puts voice-AI on a 'listen-reason-translate-act' arc that affects ElevenLabs, the call-center category, and any product that handles spoken-language input.
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