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Story 7 of 16 in the Thursday 29 October edition

Phonic launches full-duplex Phonic-1 voice model and $27.5M Series A

Phonic released its Phonic-1 speech-to-speech foundation model on 29 October 2026 at $0.07 per minute across more than 50 languages, alongside a $27.5M Series A led by First Round Capital.

Edited by Ashutosh Shrivastava
30 Oct 2026, 10:30 IST · 1 min read

Phonic-1 title over an orange multi-wave audio curve on a dark textured background
Image: Phonic

Cascaded voice stacks transcribe caller audio to text before an LLM can reason or invoke APIs, and existing speech-to-speech models typically wait until a speaker pauses before running external tools. Phonic-1 processes raw audio natively in full duplex, firing backend tool calls asynchronously while the caller is still talking so lookup results are already in context when the caller finishes speaking.

Phonic-1 dispatches all five backend tool calls during the caller’s turn and replies in 1.1 seconds, against 15.7 seconds for GPT-Live.Video: Phonic

Across independent and enterprise voice agent evaluations shown below, Phonic-1 takes the top overall score on the Artificial Analysis Speech to Speech Index ahead of Grok Voice 3, GPT-Live-1, and Gemini 3.8 Live, while leading Sierra’s tau3-Voice retail, airline, and telecom suite and Cekura S2S at sub-second audio response latency.

Benchmark table where Phonic-1 scores 87.1 on the Speech-to-Speech Index, 79.9 on tau3-Voice overall at 0.61s latency, 98.9 on Big Bench Audio, and 90.2 on Cekura S2S
Phonic-1 leads the Speech-to-Speech Index (87.1), Sierra tau3-Voice (79.9), and Cekura S2S (90.2) at $4.20 per input hour.Image: Phonic
Scatter plot of tau3-Voice agent success rate versus latency showing Phonic-1 (high) at 79.9% and 0.61 seconds ahead of GPT-Live-1 at 74.5% and 1.34 seconds and Grok Voice 3 at 71.6% and 0.81 seconds
Artificial Analysis Pareto plot comparing tau3-Voice task completion rate against time-to-first-audio latency.Image: Phonic

Phonic-1 is available through Phonic’s developer API across more than 50 languages, accompanied by $27.5M in Series A financing led by First Round Capital with participation from Lux Capital, Felicis, and Definition, bringing total capital raised to $31.5M. Phonic has not released open model weights.

Sources

  1. PrimaryIntroducing Phonic-1 and our $27.5M Series Aphonic.ai · Official launch and funding post
  2. OfficialPhonic Developer Documentationdocs.phonic.co · API overview
  3. OfficialPhonic Pricingphonic.ai · Per-minute voice API pricing

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03Coding agentGoogle

Google sets 31 December 2026 shutdown for Jules coding agent

Google announced on 29 October 2026 that its asynchronous GitHub coding agent Jules will turn read-only on 11 November 2026 and shut down permanently on 31 December 2026 as agentic development consolidates into Google Antigravity.

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