Audio Models

Judge the state of AI by X or Hacker News in early 2026, and you’d think it’s all visual. The feed is full of “Nano Banana” image-generation experiments and breathless coverage of Seedance 2.0, a video model that finally pushed time coherence past the one-minute mark. Meanwhile, audio AI quietly took an interesting turn. The part of the stack dealing with Speech-to-Text (STT), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and dialog-based voice agents has largely broken free from the scaling logic that drives everything else. Video generation still requires centralized GPU farms and nine-figure compute budgets. Audio doesn’t, and that gap is widening.   [...]