Phonic releases Phonic-1 voice model that can call tools while a caller speaksMachine translation

A 10-person startup Phonic has released Phonic-1, which it says is the only voice model that can run lookups and bookings while the caller is still mid-sentence. > First on Artificial Analysis’s speech-to-speech index at 87.1, just 0.2 points above xAI’s Grok Voice 3.0, completing 79.9% of customer-service tasks with 0.61 seconds to first audio. > Phonic-1 calls tools while the caller is still talking; in the demo it finished 5 lookups mid-speech and replied 1.1 seconds after the caller stopped, versus 15.7 seconds for OpenAI’s GPT-Live. > Phonic reports 90.2 on Cekura’s call suite, beating a transcribe-think-speak cascade at 82.9% that outscores every ranked speech-to-speech model there, though Cekura’s public board lists Phonic v1 at 68.3%. > They raised a $27.5M Series A led by First Round, taking total funding to $31.5M, and Phonic already powers Ashby’s AI job interviews in 25 countries. https://t.co/laxOzIhDwx

Introducing Phonic-1, the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks — from @phonic_co, the speech-to-speech model company. We’ve had a breakout year and raised a $27.5M Series A led by @firstround with participation from @Lux_Capital, @felicis, and Definition. https://t.co/syYLXbQ4lL