TAI #198: Real-Time Speech AI Gets Serious: Google and OpenAI Race to Own the Voice Layer

Also, Cohere Transcribe, Sora cancelled, TRIBE v2, and more! What happened this week in AI by Louie Real-time speech AI has been progressing quietly for the past year, but the past few weeks have delivered enough to warrant a dedicated look. Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash Live on March 26, OpenAI shipped GPT-Realtime-1.5 on February 23, and Cohere launched its Apache 2.0-licensed Transcribe model the same day as Google. We are now past the point where real-time voice AI feels like a -stage curiosity.