Cartesia AI Releases: Sonic-3.6, Ink-2 & Sonic 3

cartesia.ai ↗

ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 3 Cartesia releases since Oct 2025, most recently Sonic-3.6 on Aug 20, 2026. Highlights include Sonic-3.6, Ink-2, Sonic 3. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.

3 releases4 episodesOct 2025 – Aug 2026

August 2026 1

Cartesia
New Models

Sonic-3.6

Cartesia Sonic-3.6 takes #1 on both TTS leaderboards

Cartesia's Sonic-3.6 is now #1 on both Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboards, with Cartesia holding the top two spots simultaneously. Same state-space-model lineage (from Albert Gu of Mamba fame) with sub-90ms time-to-first-audio, 136 characters per second versus ElevenLabs' 46.7 at half the price, across 44 languages.

#1 on both Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboards<90ms time-to-first-audio136 chars/s vs ElevenLabs' 46.7, at half the price
Announcement (X) ↗Artificial Analysis (X) ↗Cartesia Sonic ↗
🎙️ Hear our coverage →
#voice-ai

May 2026 1

Cartesia
New Models

Ink-2

Cartesia Ink-2 tops Artificial Analysis's new STT leaderboard

Cartesia released Ink-2, which debuted as the most accurate streaming speech-to-text model with the fastest turnaround on Artificial Analysis's new STT leaderboard. It landed just after recording as part of a double post-show voice-AI drop alongside ElevenLabs Dubbing v2.

Cartesia Ink-2 ↗Cartesia announcement ↗Artificial Analysis STT leaderboard ↗
🎙️ Hear our coverage (+1 follow-up) →
#voice-ai

October 2025 1

Cartesia
New Models

Sonic 3

Cartesia Sonic 3: real-time TTS with emotion and laughter, plus $100M raise

Cartesia launched Sonic 3, a real-time text-to-speech model that adds expressive emotion and natural laughter, announced alongside a $100M funding round. Co-founder Arjun Desai joined the show to break down the voice stack and why state-space-model approaches enable this latency and expressiveness.

$100M funding round announced alongside the launch
X announcement ↗Sonic website ↗Docs ↗
🎙️ Hear our coverage →
#voice-ai#industry