Luke Oliff · Blog
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Everything I've published, in one place. Posts live at the root of this site, not under a /blog prefix, so links stay short.
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2026
Best TTS Providers 2026: Comparison of the Top 10 APIsThe top 10 text-to-speech APIs of 2026, benchmarked on the independent Artificial Analysis Speech Arena. Simba 3.2 is tied for the best-rated voice at $6 to $10 per million characters, a fraction of Cartesia, Deepgram, and ElevenLabs. Self-hosted models left out.Voice AI
Open Weights Are Eating AI: Here Are the 7 Best Open TTS Models and the Gap Nobody MentionsThis is the biggest open-weight week AI has ever had: DeepSeek V4’s stable release lands July 24 and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 weights go free on July 27, days after K3 topped a major coding leaderboard…Voice AI
Fortnite Is About to Run the Biggest Real-Time TTS Deployment in GamingEpic Games is giving 36 Fortnite characters AI voices for a “conversations” feature that leaves its experimental phase on July 30, 2026, letting creators publish islands where NPCs talk back,…Voice AI
Simba 3.0 now speaks six European languages; Simba 1.6 marked legacySimba 3.0 is no longer English-only — it now officially covers English plus German, Spanish (ES/MX), French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. The same release flags the Simba 1.6 models as legacy and confirms Simba 3.0 accepts cloned voices.Voice AI
Five Voice AI Stories from Mid-July 2026 That Actually MatterMid-July 2026 gave voice AI a new leaderboard king, a 70% price cut from Google, a $22 billion valuation rumour, a nine-figure seed round, and an AI Gene Wilder. Here are the five stories worth your…Voice AI
Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus Review: What Taking #1 Actually Bought AlibabaAlibaba’s Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena leaderboard, with an Elo of 1,236 (±17) from 1,305 blind listener votes. That puts it two points ahead of…Voice AI
Set a per-agent maximum call durationVoice agents now carry a max_call_duration_seconds field — a hard per-agent wall-clock cap on a single call. When a call reaches it, the agent ends automatically; null keeps the previous behavior of bounding calls only by your plan's ceiling.Voice AI
The Rules for Synthetic Voices Arrived This Month from Three Different Directions at OnceIn the space of about a week, synthetic voices got rule-making at three separate layers of the stack. TikTok Shop banned AI-generated voices from live commerce streams on July 15, with violations…Voice AI
Filter GET /v1/voices by type, locale, gender, and modelGET /v1/voices now accepts type, locale, gender, and model query filters, applied before pagination so pages stay full — so you can fetch, say, only English cloned voices that support Simba 3.2 in a single call.Voice AI
Per-plan API rate and concurrency limits are now publishedThe API limits reference now lists per-plan rate limits (requests per second, plus an Agents burst) and concurrency limits for both the TTS and Agents surfaces, and 429 responses carry a docs_url plus distinct rate_limited and concurrency_limited error codes.Voice AI