Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for Audio for the week ending July 31, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview.
Category Cover Image Prompt: Extreme close-up of a vintage cassette tape half-inserted into the dashboard deck of a 1973 Chevelle at night, a thin ribbon of tape curling out and catching sodium-vapor amber light from the radio dial, hot magenta neon bleeding through the rain-speckled windshield onto glossy black dash vinyl, the cassette's ivory label hand-scrawled with the title 'Audio' in loose magenta-pink brush script, 1980s neo-noir movie poster composition, 35mm anamorphic grain, soft halation, deep crushed blacks, cinematic negative space.
This Week in Audio News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Voice as a remote control for agents: Several posts describe talking to coding agents instead of typing. One user said ChatGPT Voice with Codex lets him direct work while running or driving, and another suggested using voice as a chief of staff that delegates to threads. Mollick also tried a Teenage Engineering Ting walkie-talkie to control Codex.
- Hermes Agent goes voice-first: Teknium said Hermes Agent now has wake word activation, so it can stand in for a smart speaker on devices that run its GUI or CLI. He also said voice chats got faster because most API-provided TTS backends now stream their speech.
- Speech models keep getting cheaper and more local: Artificial Analysis reported OpenAI's GPT Transcribe scores 3.31% on its word error rate benchmark at a 25% lower price than its predecessor. Cohere's Transcribe also arrived in Superwhisper, where it can run offline for dictation.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to Audio
Hey Hermes – Replace your Google Home, Alexa, whatever you got with Hermes Agent on any device that can run the GUI or CLI locally! Voice activation is now in Hermes Agent along with many other voice chat improvements. To toggle listening for wake word on, just click the ear”
https://x.com/Teknium/status/2082510413162553674
🎉 Congrats to @thinkymachines on Inkling-Small– live with Day 0 vLLM support! 276B total parameters with 12B active, native text, image, and audio input, and a 1M-token context window. Open weights, built for agentic and tool-use systems, coding assistants, and RAG. Running”
https://x.com/vllm_project/status/2082890823667237027
Voice chats in Hermes Agent are now way faster, most API provided TTS backends will stream their speech so you get closer to real time interactions!”
https://x.com/Teknium/status/2082339029375426914
I’ve been using ChatGPT Voice with Codex, and it’s changing how I get work done. Codex already lets me hand work to agents, but Voice means I don’t have to be sitting at my laptop to keep directing them. I can be out on a run, walking somewhere, or literally driving and still”
https://x.com/danizeres/status/2081945348264890495
New uses require new interfaces These are the three things I have been trying out to control Codex. Given how useful voice mode is, the Teenage Engineering Ting walky-talky has been a surprising favorite. The Codex micro is beautiful & fun, but too little info vs the Stream Deck”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2082924870497681712
Using mostly my voice, I solved one of @EpochAIResearch’s FrontierMath Open Problems: finding an explicit presentation of the 2-adic Absolute Galois Group – open for more than forty years, now with a full proof in collaboration with David Roe, the problem’s proposer. 🧵 1/n”
https://x.com/DavidTurturean/status/2081780318881677693
OpenAI has released GPT Transcribe: a Speech to Text model scoring 3.31% on AA-WER (#9), improving 0.7 p.p. over its predecessor GPT-4o Transcribe while lowering price 25% to $4.50 per 1,000 minutes of audio GPT Transcribe is OpenAI’s latest non-streaming (batch) speech”
https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2082285338509418727
Cohere Transcribe is now available on @superwhisper 💬 Push to talk and get your transcription back almost instantly. With Superwhisper, you can use Transcribe offline, integrate it into your favorite apps, and recall specialist vocabulary.”
https://x.com/cohere/status/2082499845659484655
We’ve partnered with @cohere to bring their state-of-the-art speech recognition model, Transcribe, into Superwhisper. One of the most accurate open models in the world, now powering your dictation locally. Read more:
https://x.com/superwhisper/status/2082490678890697040
Introducing Lyria 3.5 in Google Flow Music
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/lyria-3-5/
You can now run Inkling-Small, a new 276B model by Thinking Machines. Inkling-Small is the strongest open model for its size and runs local on 128GB RAM. Apache-2.0 Licensed, it has image, audio + 1M context support. Guide:
https://t.co/mwyyMtrtA9 GGUF:
https://x.com/UnslothAI/status/2082899798047563984
Day 0 support for Inkling-Small on Modal. – 276B parameter MoE with 12B active – 1M context – Variable thinking effort – Native image & audio understanding – NVFP4 checkpoint fits on a single @NVIDIAAI B300 Great to work with @thinkymachines and @sgl_project on this one.”
https://x.com/modal/status/2082896815716712726
ChatGPT Voice has 100% transformed how I work Instead of spending 12+ hours a day at my desk, I now spend at most 2 The rest is outside in nature. Picture below is me hiking this morning, getting WAY more done then I ever have at my desk You need to be using it right tho Here”
https://x.com/AlexFinn/status/2082559175461318823
Introducing Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 | SpaceXAI
https://x.ai/news/grok-voice-think-fast-2
You should use ChatGPT voice as your chief of staff Use voice to orchestrate threads and provide the context they need Spend time chatting about a problem and back and forth and ask it to delegate You can always come back and ask it to check the status of a task or add more”
https://x.com/reach_vb/status/2080683510000500741
SpaceXAI launches Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 on Agent Builder
https://www.testingcatalog.com/spacexai-launches-grok-voice-think-fast-2-0-on-agent-builder/#google_vignette?utm_source=tldrai
I’ve already had to update the guide to which AI models to use that I wrote on Thursday to include Opus 5 and Codex’s voice mode, both of which are significant & launched on Friday. Keeping up is challenging, even if you are following this stuff closely.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2081475928086003869
Fish Audio launches S2.1 Pro with support for 83 languages
https://www.testingcatalog.com/fish-audio-launches-s2-1-pro-with-support-for-83-languages/
Like Inkling, it’s natively multimodal. It’s encoder-free, with audio and images processed jointly with text. It nearly matches Inkling across multimodal evals, and it can use Python to crop, zoom, and inspect images while reasoning over documents and charts.”
https://x.com/thinkymachines/status/2082885874845725106
Today we’ve raised $52M Seed and we are announcing the public launch of S2.1 Pro. >It can clone a voice from 5 seconds of audio >2x faster than Cartesia & 1/6th the cost of Eleven Labs >most expressive model with word level control over emotion, intonation, pacing etc We”
https://x.com/FishAudio/status/2082152596739862853
Sam Altman – How to Start a Startup – Relentless | Podcast on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1j1Mq3ouVslmPnWFCYPBJV?si=74d69f67cd1a4a5d&nd=1&dlsi=06036c1e52f24790
somehow without me noticing, @latentspacepod has quietly overtaken some of my own podcast heroes like @ProfCalNewport, @TBPN, @gruber, and other AI pod friends! wow! we are seriously ramping up LS as a new tech media org, thanks to subscribers and donors. @ricmac joins us as our”
https://x.com/swyx/status/2081784874994942271
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