Audio & Speech

Today's Stories

1. 1

   McDonald's unveils "Archy" AI drive-thru amid sales slump

   McDonald's unveiled "Archy," an English- and Spanish-speaking AI drive-thru system it says exceeds 90% accuracy at early-test restaurants, with positive customer feedback, as it looks to revive slumping sales and a plunging stock. The launch is a bet that voice AI can reverse the chain's sales slump, even as Burger King rethinks its own AI drive-thru after backlash — a sign customer acceptance, not accuracy claims, may decide whether the format sticks.

   The test is whether McDonald's can avoid the drive-offs Burger King saw when guests didn't want to talk to a bot, per Burger King's Chakri Somisetti; watch whether the reported 90%-plus accuracy holds at full scale.

2. 2

   AWS ships Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base voice cloning on SageMaker JumpStart

   AWS detailed deploying Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base from Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to a managed real-time endpoint. It clones a voice from a few seconds of reference audio, in 10 languages, with cross-lingual cloning. Teams can now produce speech in a chosen speaker's voice, in any of 10 languages, from just a few seconds of reference audio — without retraining a model or collecting large training datasets.

   Whether deployments stay inside the roughly 24 GB GPU the walkthrough uses — the setup hinges on splitting GPU memory correctly between the talker and code2wav stages. Watch the KV cache token budget of 56,928 tokens for concurrency.

3. 3

   Sony, UMG sue Suno again over v6 training data

   Sony and Universal Music Group filed yet another suit against Suno, saying its v6 model is trained on user outputs from earlier models that were themselves trained on unlicensed music ripped from YouTube and other sources. Sony and UMG did not sign a licensing agreement with Suno, so the lawsuit tests whether training a new model on an older model's outputs removes the copyright problem or simply repeats it.

   The outcome hinges on whether Suno can show v6 truly started from scratch; the complaint says that unless it did, its models will continue to be built on unauthorized data.

4. 4

   Google tests "Call for Me" on Pixel 11

   Google is testing "Call for Me," letting Gemini call businesses for US Pixel 11 owners with a paid Gemini subscription and the beta Phone app, per TechCrunch. Gemini can pass along approved personal information to make reservations, reschedule appointments, or check stock, working through phone menus and hold queues from the user's own number.

   Google says it is starting small because real conversations involve a lot of nuance, so wider availability likely hinges on how well the beta handles those cases.

5. 5

   ElevenLabs CEO: tell callers they're talking to AI

   ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said this week that businesses should probably disclose when customers are speaking with an AI voice on service calls. The company supplies much of the AI voice customers already hear, so its CEO's stance may shape how much disclosure callers get — at least for now.

   The disclosure norm he describes hinges on customers coming to expect machines, so watch whether that expectation shifts and whether IPO timing and margins follow.

6. 6

   AWS ships WhisperX container for SageMaker AI

   AWS released the WhisperX Deep Learning Container, a GPU-ready image bundling Whisper, wav2vec2 forced alignment, and speaker diarization, deployable to Amazon SageMaker AI real-time and asynchronous endpoints. Teams that need word-level, speaker-labeled transcription can now run that pipeline on SageMaker AI instead of assembling these components themselves, which may shorten setup work.

   The article flags the GPU AMI pin, scaling, and cost controls as the production details that matter, so the test is whether these make the container practical to run at scale.