Luke Oliff · Blog
Writing.
Original posts, published first on this site. Imported posts live in the archive.
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220 posts
2026
Sunday roundup: six posts from a week in voice AIOriginalSix posts this week. EU watermarking, emotion prompts, open source voice agents, AI coding one year on, a raccoon heist game, and the AI industry roundup.Voice AI
This Last Week in AI: Aug 8, 2026OriginalCloudflare launched a browser for AI agents. Amazon and OpenAI unified plugin packaging. Five stories from This Last Week in AI.AI
Claude Fable 5 Built a Raccoon Heist Game From a TweetOriginalSimon Willison built a raccoon heist game with Claude Fable 5 from a 2022 tweet. One prompt, two images, and the model shipped a full 3D browser game.AI
AI Coding, One Year Later: What August 2025 Didn't See ComingOriginalThrowback Thursday. A year ago the best coding model had 200K context and scored 49% on SWE-bench. Today Claude Fable 5 scores 95% with 1M context. Here's the gap model by model.AI
Open Source Voice Agents Get Real-Time Speech in Hermes v0.20.0OriginalHermes Agent v0.20.0 brings streaming TTS, barge-in, on-device wake words, and pluggable STT/TTS to open source voice agents. Released August 3, 2026.Voice AI
TIL: Generating Audio Waveform Images With ffmpegOriginalffmpeg generates a waveform PNG from any audio file. Visualise silence gaps, volume levels, and speech patterns without a DAW.TIL
Voice Emotion Control Moves From SSML to PromptsOriginalVoice emotion control is moving to natural language prompts. Kakao's Kanana-o scores 94.50 on the Korean InstructTTSEval benchmark.Voice AI
EU AI Act Voice Watermarking: What TTS Builders Must KnowOriginalEU AI Act voice watermarking rules took effect August 2, 2026. What TTS providers and voice developers must do to stay compliant.Voice AI
WebSocket vs REST TTS APIs for Voice AgentsOriginalChoosing between WebSocket and REST for your streaming TTS API changes your voice agent's latency floor. Here is how to pick the right protocol.TTS
Smallest.ai Raises $13M to Split Voice Agents in TwoOriginalSmallest.ai closed a $13M Series A for Voice 4.0 and Hydra. Their bet is that fast real-time agents need small speech models, not big LLMs.Voice AI