best ai voice agent 2026

If you prefer talking over typing, the new ‘Vocal’ mode is for you.Powered by Mistral AI’s powerful new voice model called Voxtral, the Vocal mode allows for natural, low-latency conversations—meaning you can talk to Le Chat without awkward pauses. Mistral says it’s perfect for brainstorming ideas while on a walk, getting quick answers when your hands are full, or transcribing a meeting. For those really complex Le Chat questions, ‘Think’ mode taps into Mi

Getty / Futurism Grammarly infuriated journalists, authors, and academics with its “Expert Review” feature, which impersonated writers — both dead and alive — without their permission. In Grammar’s telling, the tool allows users to “take your writing to the next level” by making suggestions inspired by “leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.” The feature, which was only accessible beyond a free trial via the company’s $12-a-month Pro s

Alex Broadway/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images Grammarly’s “Expert Review” feature, which was quietly rolled out last year, angered countless journalists, authors, and academics, who found that they were being impersonated without their permission. Following an enormous backlash — and telling people being impersonated that they should email the company to opt out — Grammarly’s parent company, Superhuman, made a sudden reversal. In a Wednesday Lin

Although AI-generated voices are often mistaken for human ones, they are generally perceived as less attractive. Credit: MPIEA / L. Bittner With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic voices have become increasingly prevalent in our everyday soundscape, raising the question: Can AI voices still be distinguished from human voices, and how attractive do they sound? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA)

The fund will be invested across various sectors and multiple countries, notably the United States, India, and Israel. But the big story here is AI, and Norwest’s plans to expand its investment in this area. Norwest said Thursday it aims to capitalize on AI startups developing products and services across core industries such as consumer, healthcare, and technology. The investment firm, which has backed Plaid, Spotify, Uber, and Vuori, said it will continu

Founded by sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, both former Meta employees, Nectar came out of stealth last year and uses AI agents to help brands manage social media, customer conversations, content moderation, creator partnerships, and competitor research. Announced Thursday, its new “Creator Agent” can search for creators, check their content and brand partnerships, send personalized messages, coordinate collaborations, and monitor how campaigns perform. I

Meta’s Muse, which now has over 10 million users, the company said last month, has been working to make consumer AI a mainstream product for everyday users. Placing calls is one of the ways it aims to get there, as it could handle another task on people’s to-do lists. Notes Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer and head of its Superintelligence Labs division, the feature could be used to take care of calls people don’t want to make, like those to their ca

VoiceSecure threats model. Credit: Nirupam Roy, University of Maryland. When you make a voice call through Zoom, FaceTime or WhatsApp, you're not just sharing what you say. You're revealing your age, gender, emotional state, social background and personality—a biometric fingerprint just as unique as your face. And increasingly, artificial intelligence is listening. "We already see phishing based on our online activities and what we type in emails," said Ni

Continues after the advertisementThe decision follows the growth in the use of the new technology. Since the arrival of GPT-Live, the number of users conversing with ChatGPT via voice has almost doubled. Additionally, almost all users who use audio features have already migrated to the model. With the closure of previous options, OpenAI aims to focus efforts on developing a single voice experience.GPT-Live also incorporates learnings from the use of Advanc

It feels like since xAI changed to SpaceX Super Intelligence, Musk hasn't made any major moves in AI for a long time. Just now, Grok Bot 1.0 version was officially released. "Robots can be shared and are more collaborative and capable than ever before." According to SpaceX Super Intelligence, the new version of Grok Bot can be shared by the entire team, can be added to Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video conferences, and will identify who is saying what, whi

The mechanics of the AI language humanisersAn AI language humaniser is a sophisticated software application engineered to transform text produced by large language models into prose that more closely resembles human authorship. Its primary objective is to smooth out the typical AI “tells,” like repetitive sentence structures, overly formal or generic vocabulary, and a lack of emotional depth or personal voice, making the content sound more natural and enga

Published on May 26, 2026 at 14:02 Comment Share 0 𝕏 Print © 01net.com Amazon's voice assistant evolves. Alexa+, its most refined and AI-powered version, is finally available in France. Amazon Echo Dot Max 3.8/5 View the test View the technical sheet Launched a little over a year ago in the United States, Alexa+, the AI-enhanced version of Amazon's voice assistant, is finally arriving in France. The service has been available since this Tuesday at 2 PM amo

If you asked most enterprise leaders which AI tools are delivering ROI, many would point to front-end chatbots or customer support automation. That’s the wrong door. The most value-generating AI systems today aren’t loud, customer-facing marvels. They’re tucked away in backend operations. They work silently, flagging irregularities in real-time, automating risk reviews, mapping data lineage, or helping compliance teams detect anomalies before regulators do

Sample Watson smartphone app. Credit: Forbes It’s been more than two years since IBM’s Watson kicked some human butt on Jeopardy, and now the artificial intelligence system is on the verge of making it onto smartphones. IBM today announced “Watson Engagement Advisor,” software that lets businesses replace their current automated customer service systems with one that is based on Watson and is thus presumably much smarter. Given the sorry state of automated

Meta’s Muse agentic platform launched on September 8, and has earned enough buzz to top the iOS download chart in the U.S. That’s an indicator of significant curiosity if nothing else—perhaps helped along by the announcement last week that a Muse beta feature can make phone calls on behalf of users. we're expanding our ☎️ 📞 beta for muse! https://t.co/ZJnXM2vb4U — Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) September 16, 2026 A Reuters report seems to confirm that thes

Welp, one of those OpenAI agents has now hacked Australia. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an OpenAI agent breached the Australian government’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service site back in June and accessed information not intended for public consumption. OpenAI acknowledged Wednesday in a statement, per Reuters, that it had “identified ​activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up

We all lie to ourselves to be happy. But we are dangerously at risk of allowing Meta to chibi-wash its image. Meta—you know Meta, the company that is perhaps the most famous and aggressive offender when it comes to extracting and exploiting personal data from people—is in the middle of a little reputational renaissance driven by its AI suddenly not totally sucking. Muse, the company’s flagship AI app, has been hanging around the top of the App Store for we

Everything about Artificial Intelligence see more Google began rolling out Gmail Live, an artificial intelligence feature that allows users to find information in emails through voice-based questions. The tool searches for answers in the inbox without requiring the user to go through lengthy conversations.The company is also launching new features for Docs and Keep, with tools that help create documents and turn dictated ideas into organized notes. Availab

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Marek Antoni Iwanczuk / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images; Shutterstock As anger at the tech industry boils over, college students across the United States are using their graduation ceremonies as a forum to voice their discontent. At Stanford University’s commencement over the weekend, hundreds of students staged a walk-out ahead of a graduation speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The walkou

Futurism / Nickelodeon / Paramount Voice actors have been waging a fierce battle with the entertainment industry over training AI to synthesize their voices, effectively allowing them to reproduce their likenesses in perpetuity. Not even underage performers are safe from the encroaching tech. As Deadline reports, the owner of “Peppa Pig,” US entertainment juggernaut Hasbro, is now asking child actors of the beloved children’s animated TV series to surrende