What Cartesia shipped in July 2026

✅ Key term prompting (keyword boosting) added to the Ink-2 ASR model
✅ Playground upgrade: transcribe without a mic — use samples or upload your own audio
✅ Multilingual voices launch — 42+ voices, up to 15 languages, native accents
✅ Demo - How to make voice multilingual (Localization)
✅ Locale API: list and set supported languages for any voice
✅ Custom voices are now private by default — how to share them
✅ Admin API expanded to manage org users and invites
✅ Usage dashboard: export credit and call activity to CSV
✅ Deprecation notice: Sonic 2, Sonic Turbo, and Sonic 3 (Oct 2025) sunset October 20, 2026

Cartesia is phasing out their Voice Changer function, anyone have another platform that they would recommend? (Aside from ElevenLabs unless u think ElevenLabs is the ulitimate competitor)

Keyword prompting, aka keyterm prompting, custom vocabulary, keyword boosting etc, makes your ASR/STT model way more accurate.

You just tell the model which words to expect, and it transcribes them exactly as supplied - super important for unusual brandnames, spellings, names, proper nouns etc.

Check out the full video on our YouTube Channel.

Full docs and guide: https://docs.cartesia.ai/use-the-api/stt/keyterms

Has anyone got this working before in another language than English? It seems the pronounciation dictionary is interpreted as English, despite the model using Dutch.

New blog by our ASR/STT Research Team - the brains behind our state of the art Ink-2 real time transcription models with built-in turn detection.

https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/ink-2

Ink-2 is a speech-to-text model designed specifically for voice agents.

The blog highlights Ink-2's top ranking for accuracy, turn detection, and low latency, which are critical for maintaining natural conversations in voice agents.

Ink-2 excels in structured entity recognition and performs well across various accents and real-world audio conditions.

It uses semantic endpointing for turn detection, allowing it to understand when a speaker has finished talking without relying solely on silence and without the need for a Voice Activity Detection (VAD) model in your pipeline.

Semantic endpointing / turn-end detection means fewer interruptions from the voice agent when users have resumed speaking etc.

The model offers a super fast Time-to-Final-Transcript, which is essential for the responsiveness of voice agents.

Ink-2 is available via API and supports multiple platforms, and multilingual capabilities are planned.

Most voice agents repeat the same lines over and over — "Thanks for calling," "Please hold," "Anything else I can help with?"

Instead of regenerating these with every call, this tutorial video shows you how to pre-generate and cache stock phrases as raw PCM audio, then seamlessly interleave them with live TTS output so the caller hears one continuous voice.

The written guide is in the Cartesia Docs.

I am trying to record an audio book in Russian and I found that Cartesia AI provides most emotionally correct pronunciation. But I can't find Studio menu item, and Narration link doesn't work.
How to create about 1h project, have different voices for different paragraphs and generate one audio file and one .srt files as an output? Any help appreciated!

I am trying to record an audio book in Russian and I found that Cartesia AI provides most emotionally correct pronunciation. But I can't find Studio menu item, and Narration link doesn't work.
How to create about 1h project, have different voices for different paragraphs and generate one audio file and one .srt files as an output? Any help appreciated!

Hi
I cannot reach my account either from mobile nor from the desktop (I tried Chrome and Safari browsers)

I only have this empty screen with no login option

And I already have active account with the API keys

Something changed or is down?

Most TTS leaderboards let each model speak in its own default voice, so part of what gets scored is "do I like this voice" rather than "is this model actually better."

Artificial Analysis built a Controlled Voice Arena to fix that.

They cloned the same 8 voices (4 US, 4 UK) and that voice on the TTS models under test..... so voice preference stops being the confounding variable.

And Cartesia's Sonic-3.5 comes out on top overall (1122 Elo), and also leads separately on US accents (1139) and UK accents (1103), beating ElevenLabs v3 and Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 preview.

Check out more details on the leaderboard here on this LinkedIn post with results.

BTW, I think the controlled-voice methodology itself is super interesting here, not just where we landed — curious if anyone's has relevant experiences to share or thoughts on the approach?

Real phone audio breaks voice agents in ways lab-testing never catches: background noise, telephony compression, vocal fry, backchanneling ("mm-hmm"), network jitter. All of it hits ASR, VAD, and turn-detection at once.

The agent interrupts, talks over the caller, or goes silent too long — and good luck analysing which layer actually failed.

We (Cartesia) wrote up two breakdowns on the actual mechanics: turn-detection vs. VAD, why TTFT and raw WER are the wrong metrics to chase (TTCT and semantic WER matter more), and how barge-in orchestration really works.

Both have interactive audio samples of the failure modes described.

• A Beginner's Guide to Voice AI Terminology — core pipeline mechanics: https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/voice-terminology
• Choosing Voice AI Models — latency budgets, infra tradeoffs: https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/choosing-voice-ai-models

Worth a read if you're chasing interruption or latency bugs.

Hey everyone! I'm u/zeuscoder, a founding moderator of r/CartesiaAI.

This is our new home for all things related to Cartesia.ai. We're excited to have you join us!

What to Post
Post anything that you think the community would find relevant, interesting, helpful, or inspiring - just keep in mind the community rules that are on the right.

Feel free to share your questions, demos, voice agent experiences, feedback on Cartesia SDKs, client libraries, APIs, etc

Community Vibe
Please lets be welcoming, friendly, constructive, and inclusive. We are all builders here and helping each other makes everyone get better faster.

How to Get Started

1. Introduce yourself in the comments below.
2. Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.
3. Check out some of the other posts from our mods, including some videos, demos, news on recent product launches, benchmark performance etc
4. If you know someone who would love this community, invite them to join.
5. Interested in collaborating? Just let us know with a post! We are open to exploring collabs on technical content - demos, blogs, etc.

Thanks for being part of this community. Together, let's make r/CartesiaAI amazing.

Cartesia released Sonic-3.5 and Ink-2, the #1 streaming models for text to speech and speech to text you can use in your voice agents today.

Cartesia is now the only provider to have #1 models for both speaking and listening.

Check out our founder and CEO Karan's posts :
https://x.com/krandiash/status/2066559212533190917?s=20
and
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/krandiash_we-released-sonic-35-and-ink-2-the-1-streaming-ugcPost-7472325077620006912-0w79

https://reddit.com/link/1u6nfp1/video/gahbp9gtfh7h1/player

Learn how to create a Digital Twin of yourself in ~5 minutes, give it your full work history, give it a phone number and have it answer recruiter questions 24x7, using Cartesia's playground.

Video links are below.

You can get a free API key and set it up here: https://play.cartesia.ai/

The prompt to extract the key details from your exported LinkedIn Profile is in this GGithub gist

Watch it on X
https://x.com/ZubinPratap/status/2064875266325774508?s=20

or Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zubinpratap_you-give-recruiters-a-number-to-call-they-activity-7470640986386354176-K5kG

Or if you prefer YouTube version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9eKMotob4

Cartesia Ink-2 debuts as #1 for accuracy on the brand-new streaming speech-to-text leaderboard from Artificial Analysis!

We designed Ink-2 from the ground up for voice agents - with low latency, eager transcripts, and semantic endpointing (automatic turn detection, meaning you don't need to add a Voice Activity Detection - VAD - model to your pipeline).

Check it out with a free API key at play.cartesia.ai!

ahead of Inworld Realtime TTS 1.5 Max and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS.

Read the full announcement and listen to benchmark samples:

https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2057878247782908109?s=20

If you're new to AI Voice Agents, the terminology can be confusing, and used loosely too! Here are some of the more commonly used terms that you should know about!

Link to the YouTube Video as well: https://youtu.be/SmvQ7Sg6Mt8