Gradium AI Releases New Default TTS Model: 81.0% Hard-Case Pass Rate at 216 ms Time-to-First-Audio
Voice agents fail on exactly the parts of a call that matter most: the order number, the callback digits, the email address the caller has to write down. Gradium AI has released a new text-to-speech model and made it the default across its API and Studio. The company reports an 81.0% human-rated pass rate on a 500-sentence hard-case set spanning five languages, ahead of Cartesia Sonic 3.6 at 75.1% and ElevenLabs v3 Conversational at 65.4%. Time to first audio is 216 ms at P50 on Coval, 170 ms f
Gradium AI released a new text-to-speech model that converts written text into spoken audio, now set as the default option across its service as of August 31, 2026. The model matters because voice agents often fail on critical information like phone numbers, email addresses, and reference codes that callers need to hear accurately, and this new model achieved an 81.0% human-rated success rate on difficult test cases across five languages, outperforming competing models from Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Fish Audio, and Inworld. The model also generates audio quickly, producing the first audio output in 216 milliseconds with minimal variation between attempts, ranking it competitively among tested alternatives. Existing users require no action to receive these improvements, and Gradium has published its 500-sentence evaluation dataset openly on Hugging Face so others can verify the results.
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