Sonar Brings Audio Search to AI Agents and Podcast Creators
Sonar entered public beta offering natural-language search across podcasts, news, earnings calls, and radio archives for AI agents. Free tier: 500 queries/month.
Spotify Studio Brings AI Personal Podcasts to 20+ Markets
Spotify's new Studio desktop app uses an AI agent to generate private, personalized podcasts from your calendar, email, and web browsing. In research preview across 20+ markets.
Spotify Debuts ElevenLabs Audiobook Tool for Creators
Spotify announced a new ElevenLabs-powered audiobook creation tool at its May 21 Investor Day, with new audiobook subscription plans expected later in 2026.
ElevenLabs Speech Engine Tutorial: Add Voice in 30 Min
Wrap an existing chat agent (Claude, GPT, Gemini) with ElevenLabs Speech Engine voice in roughly 30 minutes. Step-by-step tutorial covers Node and Python SDKs, WebRTC token flow, turn detection, interruption, and the upgrade path to ElevenAgents.
Context-Aware Audio Denoising: AI That Adapts to Your Scene
Researchers at Tampere University published a preprint introducing ACAD, an AI system that adapts what it treats as noise based on the acoustic scene it detects.
Stable Audio 3: Open-Weights AI Generates 6-Minute Songs
Stability AI released Stable Audio 3 on May 20, 2026, a family of open-weights latent diffusion models that generate up to 6 minutes and 20 seconds of audio from a text prompt, including on a MacBook Pro M4.
StemDeck: Free Local Audio Stem Separation
StemDeck v0.5.0 splits any track into vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano, and other elements. Runs locally, free, no account required.
ComfyUI-DramaBox Adds LoRA Support for Custom Voice Training
ComfyUI-DramaBox added LoRA weight injection on May 16, letting creators load custom voice personalities into workflows without model reloads.
OpenAI Acquires Weights.gg, Folds Voice-Cloning Team
OpenAI quietly bought voice-cloning startup Weights.gg, dispersed its six-person team across existing groups, and folded the tech into Voice Engine work.
Supertonic 3: On-Device TTS Speaks 31 Languages
Supertonic 3 is an open-weights, CPU-only TTS engine from Supertone with 31 languages, expression tags, and zero-shot voice cloning.
Break-the-Beat: AI Turns MIDI Drums Into Audio
Break-the-Beat! is a new AI model that renders drum MIDI patterns as realistic audio using a reference recording for timbre. Researchers released a demo with dozens of examples spanning Speed Metal, Funk Rock, and electronic drum kits.
Scenema Audio: Open-Source Voice Cloning From LTX 2.3
ScenemaAI released Scenema Audio on Hugging Face and GitHub, an open-weights expressive TTS and zero-shot voice cloning model built on the audio half of Lightricks LTX-2. MIT inference code, 13 languages, real-time on a 24 GB GPU.
Google Flow Music Reaches Believe and TuneCore Artists
Google partners with Believe and TuneCore to route Flow Music, its Lyria 3 Pro song studio, to indie artists. Ambassador program meets Google's product team weekly.
ElevenLabs Hits $500M ARR: What It Means for Creators
ElevenLabs crossed $500 million in ARR on May 5, 2026, announcing BlackRock, Nvidia, Jamie Foxx, and Eva Longoria as new investors. The $11B valuation makes it the most-funded independent voice AI company.
Ableton Live 12.4: Link Audio and 6 Workflow Updates
Ableton Live 12.4 shipped May 5, 2026 as a free update for Live 12. The standout feature is Link Audio, which streams audio wirelessly between two devices on your local network without extra hardware.
Voicebox: Free Open-Source Voice Studio with 7 TTS Engines
Jamie Pine's Voicebox brings seven TTS engines and voice cloning to your local machine. Free, open source, and entirely offline.
RODE Launches RODECaster Studio: AI Podcast Post-Production App
RODE announced RODECaster Studio at NAB 2026 on April 17, 2026 -- a new Mac and Windows desktop app that brings AI-powered editing to podcast post-production.
Google Gemini Mac App Adds Image, Video, and Music Generation
Google launched a native Gemini app for Mac on April 16, 2026, bringing image, video, and music generation directly to the desktop for the first time.
Darwin-TTS Adds Emotion to AI Voice With No Training Required
Researchers published Darwin-TTS on April 15, 2026, a text-to-speech model that adds emotional expression to AI voice without any training, fine-tuning, or new data.
Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Beats ElevenLabs in Quality Benchmarks
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS on April 15, 2026, a text-to-speech model that outperforms ElevenLabs v3 in quality benchmarks while offering a generous free tier.
Splice Launches AI Sample Variations with Built-In Creator Payouts
Splice launched Variations and Craft on April 15, 2026, letting producers remix any sample from its 3-million-sound library while automatically compensating the original creator.
ComfyUI Adds Frame-Synced AI Music via Sonilo
ComfyUI now supports Sonilo via Partner Nodes, letting creators generate full-length soundtracks that sync to video footage frame by frame.
llama.cpp Adds Audio Support With Qwen3-Omni
llama.cpp release b8769 adds audio multimodal support for Qwen3-Omni and Qwen3-ASR models, bringing local speech recognition and audio understanding to consumer hardware.
VoxCPM2 Open-Sources 2B-Param TTS With 30 Languages
OpenBMB released VoxCPM2, a 2 billion parameter text-to-speech model that runs on 8GB VRAM, supports 30 languages at 48kHz, and can design voices from natural language descriptions.