Every THE D[AI]LY BRIEF article on contact center AI — enterprise AI analysis, benchmarks, vendor comparisons, and ROI frameworks for technology and business leaders. Updated as new coverage publishes.
Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming claims a 2.5% streaming WER at $0.54 an audio hour, but it ships as a public preview with no SLA and no word-level timestamps, at 2.7 times Grok's streaming price.
October 3, 2026 · 9 min read
A $0.05 voice AI minute bills $0.09 to $0.14 once transcription, the model, the voice and the phone line are added. On a 40,000-minute inbound workload, ElevenLabs Agents was the cheapest managed platform and Bland AI the most expensive.
October 1, 2026 · 15 min read
Inworld bought Ultravox and gave its own voices a free TTS-2 upgrade. Agents on ElevenLabs, Cartesia and other third-party voices got one line: nothing changes today.
October 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Inception's Mercury Voice cuts the voice-agent LLM line to about $0.009 a minute, but its 320ms latency is model-only and its benchmark win arrives without numbers. Bake it off on your own calls before you swap.
September 29, 2026 · 8 min read