Luke Oliff · Blog
Writing.
Original posts, published first on this site. Imported posts live in the archive.
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213 posts
2026
Voice AI's Real Competition Shifted From Models to PlatformsOriginalTTS model quality converged by June 2026. The real competitive moat shifted to developer experience, platform integration, and compliance tooling.Voice AI
TTS Latency: How Time to First Audio Actually WorksOriginalA deep dive into Time to First Audio, the metric that defines voice agent responsiveness, and what happens in the latency pipeline from text to speech.Voice AI
TIL: Read speech marks from the Speechify API responseOriginalEvery Speechify TTS response includes word-level timing data alongside the audio. Here is how to read speech marks and what you can do with them.TIL
Inference costs are dropping and that changes everythingOriginalOpenAI's custom chip, SpaceX compute deals, and falling token prices are driving down the cost of running AI models faster than most developers realise.AI
Six stories shaping voice AI in mid-June 2026OriginalMicrosoft MAI-Voice-2, Google live translation, DeepL bought Mixhalo, and open-weight TTS models kept shrinking. Six stories from a busy month in voice AI.Voice AI
When speech-to-text hears something else entirelyOriginalThe funniest and weirdest STT transcriptions from real Deepgram API usage. Some are bugs, some are features, and every single one made me laugh.Developer Experience
Voice data residency decides where your agent runsOriginalVoice data residency decides where speech APIs process audio. Deepgram Australia went live June 17, 2026, shaping how teams pick STT and TTS providers.Voice AI
Streaming TTS: Rethinking the Voice Audio PipelineOriginalStreaming TTS changes what voice applications expect from audio APIs. Time-to-first-byte drops, complexity moves into buffer management and chunk boundaries, and knowing when streaming isn't the answer matters just as much.Voice AI
A Rising Tide Lifts All BoatsOriginalI used AI to help edit this article. The experiences, arguments, disappointments, and frustrations are mine. Every example is real.
Export Controls Took Down Claude Fable 5OriginalAn export control directive shut down Claude Fable 5 globally. The first government shutdown of a deployed AI model and what developers should know.AI