Building Voice Agents with Nvidia Open Models (www.daily.co)

NVIDIA has unveiled a guide for developers to create ultra-low-latency voice agents using its open-source models, including the Nemotron Speech ASR for automatic speech recognition, Nemotron 3 Nano for conversational AI, and a preview of the upcoming Magpie text-to-speech model. This development is significant for the AI/ML community as it represents a shift towards more accessible, efficient, and customizable voice agent technology that can compete with proprietary solutions. The new Nemotron Speech ASR can achieve transcription latencies under 24 milliseconds, a substantial improvement over existing commercial models that typically range from 200 to 800 milliseconds. This guide encourages experimentation with voice agents on various platforms, including scalable cloud solutions and local hardware like NVIDIA's DGX Spark or RTX 5090. The use of open models allows for tailored optimizations in machine learning pipelines and promises greater adaptability to specific application needs, such as customer support and user interaction scenarios. With its benchmarking against leading commercial models, Nemotron 3 Nano emerges as a key player for lightweight deployment while maintaining high performance in conversational benchmarks, signifying a growing trust in open-source frameworks for enterprise-level applications.