Six posts this week. My keyboard filed a noise complaint somewhere around post four. Here is what I wrote and what stuck with me.
Monday: EU AI Act voice watermarking went live
The synthetic audio watermarking rules took effect August 2. I wrote about what TTS builders actually need to do about it. Short version: if your API serves generated audio, you need a marking pipeline before anyone downstream can ship. Speechify has been on this for months. Not every provider has.
Tuesday: emotion moved from SSML to prompts
Kakao dropped Kanana-o, which scores 94.50 on the Korean InstructTTSEval and handles emotion through natural language. You write "say this excitedly" instead of <prosody rate="fast"> and it just works. I want every TTS API to go this direction. SSML is powerful but nobody wakes up excited to write angle brackets.
