Promptable Prosody, SOTA ASR, and Semantic VAD: OpenAI revamps Voice AI

**OpenAI** has launched three new state-of-the-art audio models in their API, including **gpt-4o-transcribe**, a speech-to-text model outperforming Whisper, and **gpt-4o-mini-tts**, a text-to-speech model with promptable prosody allowing control over timing and emotion. The **Agents SDK** now supports audio, enabling voice agents. OpenAI also updated turn detection for real-time voice activity detection (VAD) based on speech content. Additionally, **OpenAI's o1-pro** model is available to select developers with advanced features like vision and function calling, though at higher compute costs. The community shows strong enthusiasm for these audio advancements, with a radio contest for TTS creations underway. Meanwhile, **Kokoro-82M v1.0** emerges as a leading open weights TTS model with competitive pricing on Replicate.