Luke Oliff · Blog
Writing.
Original posts, published first on this site. Imported posts live in the archive.
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213 posts
2026
What a Week at SpeechifyOriginalSimba went multilingual, streaming got timestamps, voice agents learned to switch languages mid-call. Qwen took the crown. MCP broke everything.Voice AI
MAI-Voice-Flash, Opus 5, and a Red LineOriginalMicrosoft MAI-Voice-2-Flash enters TTS at $15/M. Anthropic ships Opus 5 at half Fable's cost. OpenAI faces red-line questions after Hugging Face.Voice AI
MCP Goes Stateless on Monday: What Breaks and WhyOriginalThe MCP 2026-07-28 spec removes the initialize handshake and session IDs. I read the release candidate and wrote a stateless handler.AI
The Guardrails Worked on Exactly the Wrong PeopleOriginalWhen an AI agent breached Hugging Face, responders reached for frontier models to analyse the attack and got refused. The attacker didn't.AI
The 7 Best Open TTS Models as Open Weights Eat AIOriginalDeepSeek V4 and Kimi K3 made this the biggest open-weight week AI has had. Here are the 7 best open TTS models, and the gap nobody mentions.Voice AI
Fortnite Is About to Be Gaming's Biggest TTS DeploymentOriginalEpic Games gives 36 Fortnite characters AI voices on July 30, 2026, making it the biggest real-time TTS deployment gaming has seen.Voice AI
Five Voice AI Stories from July 2026 That MatterOriginalMid-July 2026 gave voice AI a new leaderboard king, a 70% Google price cut, a $22 billion valuation rumour, and an AI Gene Wilder.Voice AI
Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus Review: What #1 Bought AlibabaOriginalAlibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus tops the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena at 1,236 Elo from 1,305 blind votes. A review of what that buys.Voice AI
Synthetic Voice Rules Arrived from Three DirectionsOriginalIn one week, synthetic voices got rules at three layers of the stack: a TikTok Shop ban, platform policy, and government regulation.Voice AI
Brussels Just Gave Voice Assistants the Keys to AndroidOriginalThe EU's Digital Markets Act decisions of July 16, 2026 order Google to open Android to rival AI assistants, with certified voice access.Voice AI