Voice AI News: May 11–17, 2026
Voice AI roundup May 11-17: Vapi $50M Series B, Basata $21M medical agents, OpenAI buys Weights.gg, Resemble DramaBox TTS, Thinking Machines full-duplex preview
Vapi Raises $50 Million In Series B Funding For Enterprise Voice Agents
The voice AI platform closed its Series B at a $500 million valuation after securing major deals like handling all inbound calls for Amazon Ring. This round, led by Peak XV with Microsoft’s M12 and others, underscores accelerating enterprise adoption of real-time conversational voice technology.
Basata Secures $21 Million Series A To Scale Medical Referral Voice Agents
The startup raised funding led by Basis Set Ventures to expand its AI voice agents that process fax referrals and schedule specialist appointments. The capital will help close gaps in healthcare workflows through automated, natural voice interactions.
OpenAI Quietly Acquired Voice Cloning Startup Weights.gg
The deal gives OpenAI tools for creating realistic AI voice clones via a former social platform for sharing speech models. Reported this week, the acquisition strengthens OpenAI’s capabilities in generative voice and speech AI.
Resemble AI Releases DramaBox Open-Weight Expressive TTS Model
The new model supports stage-direction prompting for emotional arcs, breaths, and voice cloning from short audio samples, built on LTX-2.3 and available on Hugging Face. It advances accessible, high-fidelity speech synthesis for developers and creators.
Thinking Machines Lab Unveils Interaction Models Research Preview
Mira Murati’s startup introduced native full-duplex models for seamless real-time voice, video, and text collaboration without traditional turn-taking delays. The May 11 announcement highlights a shift toward more natural, interruptible conversational AI systems.