23 February 2026. Inside this issue:
NVIDIA releases full-duplex voice AI with 0.07-second speaker-switch latency
Open-source model clones voices from seconds of audio and holds any persona
Outperforms Gemini Live on naturalness and interruption handling
✍️ Essentials
NVIDIA released PersonaPlex in January 2026 - a 7B-parameter model that listens and speaks simultaneously. Latency on speaker switching is 0.07 seconds versus 1.3 seconds for Google’s Gemini Live. Naturalness score: 3.90/5 versus 3.72 for Gemini Live.
A short audio clip sets the voice. A text prompt sets the persona. Any voice with any role - no retraining. Built on Kyutai’s Moshi architecture, trained on 144,000 synthetic conversations in six hours on eight A100 GPUs. Code and weights released under MIT licence.
🐻 Bear’s take
Any team with GPU access can now build production-grade voice agents without licensing fees. For startups, the build-versus-buy equation just shifted hard toward build. Call centres can deploy agents that callers will struggle to distinguish from people.
🚨 Bear in mind
BPO providers and call centre operators face direct displacement risk. English only for now. If you manage voice operations, test PersonaPlex against your current provider this quarter.