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“Speech-to-Text” — 4 articles ✕
Audible has developed a controllable text-to-speech pipeline that uses LLMs to profile characters and attribute dialogue with up to 97% accuracy. By providing 'stage directions' as natural-language captions, the system ensures distinct, consistent character voices over long-form content.
IBM rolled out three updates to its Granite Speech family: a brand-new 2B speech-language model (granite-speech-5.0-2b), a revised 470M Turbo CTC model built for speed, and an improved 4.1-2B-Plus model tuned for multi-speaker recordings. Together they target high-accuracy transcription/translation, fast on-device recognition, and accurate speaker/timestamp labeling. All three remain under Apache 2.0.
Mistral AI released Voxtral 3, a set of speech recognition and speech synthesis models paired with an SDK that lets a single real-time pipeline listen, reason, call tools and speak back. The recognition models (Small, Mini and Realtime Transcribe 3) cover 50+ languages with speaker diarization, keyword-biasing for technical vocabulary, and transcription latency under 500ms, which Mistral claims beats Whisper, Scribe v2 and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe on its benchmarks. The speech synthesis model, Mini TTS 3, handles 35+ languages and 50+ dialects with emotion, pacing and emphasis that adapt to context, priced at $13 per million characters, and a separate Pro Voice feature can reproduce a person's voice and emotional range from just 30 minutes of recorded audio. All components can run through Mistral's EU-hosted API or be deployed on a customer's own servers.
AWS and Deepgram jointly rebuilt the Nova-3 speech-to-text model to run natively on Trainium2 chips instead of standard GPU-based PyTorch setups, targeting large offline transcription jobs. The work involved rewriting bottleneck layers as custom kernels and replacing Deepgram's Python serving layer with a Rust runtime calling Trainium directly. The result: a single trn2.3xlarge instance running eight parallel model copies delivers 11-70% more transcribed audio per dollar than Deepgram's prior infrastructure, with similar savings potentially available to customers self-hosting on SageMaker.