best ai voice agent 2026

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic; Shutterstock It’s 2026 and we’re still getting new “Toy Story” movies. In fact, we’re now on “Toy Story 5” — and the original was released in 1995, some 31 years ago. How long can Disney and Pixar keep this madness up? It’s a thought that’s crossed the mind of Tom Hanks, the voice behind series’ rootin’ tootin’ protagonist Woody. In a recent Entertainment Weekly int

OpenAI has been in triage mode over the past few months, following a string of reports of its AI agents escaping containment and breaking into third-party organizations. Now the company is trying to put a new face on its technology—one that makes it look like a cuddly animated sidekick, rather than a potential cybercriminal. At its annual developer’s conference on Tuesday, OpenAI introduced dots: AI agents with emoji-like avatars designed to serve as 24/7

In typical Meta fashion, the company’s popular new AI agent Muse reportedly keeps detailed, regularly updated files on the people in users’ lives. Nearly a month after its launch, researchers are digging into how Muse works. It turns out the AI agent will openly share internal files and instructions when users ask, offering a peek at how it operates. One of the somewhat unsettling details is an hourly process that instructs Muse to create and update “a pag

OpenAI is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice mode. The company provided The Washington Post with documents and recordings clearly meant to support OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s defense against Johansson’s claims that Sky was made to sound “eerily similar” to her critically acclaimed voice acting performance in the sci-fi film Her. Johansson has alleged that OpenAI hired

AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show. Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown. A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they “owed the federal government nearly $100,000.” To dupe their targets, the scammers cut together re

Shutterstock / Futurism If you thought AI customer service bots were bad, just wait until you need to convince a large language model that yes, you have been involved in a car accident, actually. According to new reporting by the Shreveport Times, officials at the Orleans Parish Communication District — the emergency dispatch agency for the city of New Orleans — are now integrating AI answering agents into its workflow. The new tool is called AI Emergency

Under the hood is everything found in any manufacturing operation:“Who does what” tasks: buy, order, make, design, with photos and deadlines;work orders and operations for a product;warehouse: incoming stock, issuance, material reservations for work orders, storage locations;tools tracked individually, with their history and current holder;drawings and documents with revisions;production comments, shortages, and purchase requests.Everyone sees their own pa

We can replace human workers with AI agents, but we can’t take sexism out of the workplace. A recently published study from researchers at Ireland’s University of Limerick found that existing conscious and unconscious gender biases extend to AI agents, resulting in female-presenting bots getting paid less than their male-presenting counterparts. The study took 189 knowledge workers and placed them in a virtual reality office where they were made to work al

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images In 2024, award-winning singer songwriter Taylor Swift became the victim of a wave of pornographic deepfakes flooding social media feeds. The controversy set the stage for a pandemic of nonconsensual AI-generated nudes, forcing big tech companies into damage control mode and even striking up a political brawl during the runup to the 2024 presidential elections. Even at the time, Swift’s lawyers were no strangers to their client

Published on October 6, 2026 at 08:28 Comment 0 𝕏 Print The option is not yet available in Europe, probably for legal reasons related to the AI Act and the GDPR. © Bleeping Computer A new warning appears in the Claude apps: the assistant now asks for permission to use your voice recordings to train Anthropic’s models. Yet the company’s privacy pages promised the opposite as recently as six months ago. Claude started speaking in May 2025, and its voice mode

The development path for agentic AI models is cloudy to say the least, but companies have invested so heavily in creating these systems that some tools have percolated to the surface. The AAIF, which is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, has been launched to govern the development of three key AI technologies: Model Context Protocol (MCP), goose, and AGENTS.md. MCP is probably the most well-known of the trio, having been open-sourced by Anthropic a ye

TW3 Entertainment Just when you thought the holiday season couldn’t arrive any earlier this year, here comes an AI-generated Christmas movie. Titled “Merry the Christmas Witch,” it’s based on a children’s book and will inspire awe in its young audience about the magic of the holidays — through ghoulish and uncanny AI imagery (you can see footage here). The film — which currently has no distributor — cost $1.5 million to make, but its director brags that us

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A speech study by a research team from The University of Texas at El Paso has identified an underappreciated aspect of speech in English and Spanish speakers that could lead to improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) spoken dialogue systems. People tend to articulate their words less precisely when expressing a positive feeling, according to new research led by Nigel Ward, Ph.D., a professor in UTEP's Department of Co

Shutterstock / Futurism Microsoft just filed a patent for an AI product that would be able to transform live video in real time to alter speakers’ words and faces. The patent, as first flagged by patent-tracker Patentlyze, is described by its inventors as a “near real-time artificial intelligence (AI) enhancement of video or augmented reality (AR) presentations of live events.” Using AI agents, the system would identify and alter or remove certain words, w

Published on October 21, 2026 at 2:00 PM Comment 0 𝕏 Print © Netflix Netflix was riding the fall’s tech-thriller wave with the hacking of Hugging Face by OpenAI agents. The victim, for its part, finds the film next to the billboard and makes it very publicly known. The documentary AI Gone Wild, 27 minutes long, has been available on Netflix since October 12. The film reconstructs the July attack on the artificial intelligence platform: agents designed by O

Published on October 22, 2026 at 3:35 PM Comment 1 𝕏 Print © Anthropic - 01net One morning, Claude will write to you first. Anthropic launches Duet, an agent that monitors your apps and acts on your behalf. Three weeks after OpenAI, six after Meta, and still not for Europe. Anthropic opened a waiting list on October 21 for Claude Duet, a “research preview” reserved for U.S. Pro and Max subscribers, while Team and Enterprise plans remain excluded for now. T

Built on a licence signed in MarchThe Agentforce Coworker rollout follows a multi-year agreement the Adecco Group signed with Salesforce in March, running through 2027, for unlimited global access to Agentforce 360. The group noted that the “unlimited” access is subject to the terms of its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement. At the time, the group said the agreement supported its target for more than half of Adecco revenues to be powered by agentic AI by

An experiment successfully issued voice commands from the ground to a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite and launched the FPS game “DOOM” in space. The system worked by having AI onboard the satellite recognize the voice and launch the game. Seven experiments were conducted from April through July 2026, ultimately succeeding in control through speech spoken directly by a human. First Voice Command of a Satellite Achieved Through ESA’s OPS-SAT Space Lab

Now, it’s revisiting one of its first major AI features, taking a cue from the personalization options other AI assistants routinely offer. With the update, Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to choose from an expanded set of AI DJ voices in both English and Spanish. The voices include seven English options with British, American, Irish, Australian, and Indian accents, and two new Spanish options. The different voices will have their own unique perso