Add Speech to Your AI Agent in 5 Minutes

Your agent reads text. It writes text. It reasons about text. But it can't hear a student say "hello" and tell them their /h/ is perfect while their /l/ needs work. Here's how to fix that. The Problem AI agents are text-native. They consume text, produce text, and reason over text. But a growing class of applications requires agents to interact with the physical world through sound: Language tutoring agents that listen to a student and give phoneme-level feedback Customer service agents that transcribe calls and respond with natural speech Accessibility agents that read content aloud and accept voice commands Interview practice agents that evaluate spoken responses You could try to hack this with LLM inference. Ask Opus to "evaluate this pronunciation" and you'll get a confident, plausible, and completely fabricated phoneme analysis. LLMs don't have acoustic models. They can't compute phoneme-level pronunciation scores because they never see the audio signal. What you need are speciali