Luke Oliff ยท Developer relations
Developer relations, written down.
I'm Luke Oliff, Head of Developer Relations at Speechify. I write about docs, developer communities, and the craft of making APIs easy to build with. Everything I publish lives here.
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Writing
Recent posts.
The latest things I published. Post links live at the root, so they stay short and they stay put.
Open Source Voice Agents Get Real-Time Speech in Hermes v0.20.0OriginalHermes Agent v0.20.0 brings streaming TTS, barge-in, on-device wake words, and pluggable STT/TTS to open source voice agents. Released August 3, 2026.Voice AI
Voice Emotion Control Moves From SSML to PromptsOriginalVoice emotion control is moving to natural language prompts. Kakao's Kanana-o scores 94.50 on the Korean InstructTTSEval benchmark.Voice AI
EU AI Act Voice Watermarking: What TTS Builders Must KnowOriginalEU AI Act voice watermarking rules took effect August 2, 2026. What TTS providers and voice developers must do to stay compliant.Voice AI
WebSocket vs REST TTS APIs for Voice AgentsOriginalChoosing between WebSocket and REST for your streaming TTS API changes your voice agent's latency floor. Here is how to pick the right protocol.TTS
Smallest.ai Raises $13M to Split Voice Agents in TwoOriginalSmallest.ai closed a $13M Series A for Voice 4.0 and Hydra. Their bet is that fast real-time agents need small speech models, not big LLMs.Voice AI