In a significant move that challenges the current hierarchy of the text-to-speech (TTS) landscape, Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab has officially unveiled Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS. This production-oriented suite arrives as a robust, enterprise-grade solution designed to address the persistent tension between synthetic voice naturalness and operational efficiency. By prioritizing granular control, multilingual versatility, and extreme emotional expressiveness, Alibaba is […]
New Google Home speaker incoming? The Nest Mini and Nest Audio are suddenly hard to find
(Image credit: Future) What you need to know It looks like it might finally be time for some new smart speakers, as Google’s upcoming Home speaker with Gemini appears to be getting closer to launch. Alongside the Pixel 10 series launch last year, Google briefly teased a new Home smart speaker. The company hasn’t refreshed […]
Microsoft AI Introduces MAI-Transcribe-1.5: 2.4% WER on Artificial Analysis, Best-in-Class FLEURS Accuracy, and Up to 5x Faster Long-Audio Transcription
Last week Microsoft AI has announced MAI-Transcribe-1.5. It is the second iteration of the company’s in-house speech-to-text family. The model targets accuracy across 43 languages, accents, and noisy environments. The Microsoft team positions it for production transcription workloads. What is MAI-Transcribe-1.5 MAI-Transcribe-1.5 is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. It takes audio as input and […]