Gemini Live retirement: what changes for voice agents on 17 November
Google retires the Gemini API's preview Live and TTS models on 17 November 2026. Swapping in Gemini 3.8 Live is a one-line change; its new defaults for tool calls, silence and TTS prompts are not. Here is what changes, which date applies on which surface, and how to re-test each agent.
Speech-to-speech vs pipeline voice AI: choose per call, not per platform
Speech-to-speech and pipeline voice agents are no longer separated by latency. After eight days in which every pipeline stage gained a faster model and speech-to-speech systems stopped blocking on reasoning, the choice comes down to which guarantees a call needs. Here is what each path can't do, from running both in production, and a rule for choosing per call type.
GPT-Live-1: full-duplex voice AI, and why Callaro was live with it on day one
OpenAI launched GPT-Live-1 on September 10, 2026 — a full-duplex speech model that listens and speaks at the same time and delegates reasoning to a backend of your choosing. Callaro has run it in production since launch day. Here's what full-duplex changes, and why it makes for the most natural AI voice agent yet.
Building on a frozen speech-to-speech model: the delegation pattern behind natural voice AI
Speech-to-speech models sound remarkably human, but they hand you a locked instruction budget, no mid-call edits, and behavior you can't fully control. The way production teams get real work out of them is a delegation pattern — the live model talks, a second model does the thinking. Here's how it works and where it breaks.