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Only First party#Voice
Nov 14Sat
  1. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Open source TTS vs paid APIs: How to choose wisely

    This article compares open source and paid text-to-speech APIs, noting that both can produce high-quality speech and that the choice depends on team capacity and workload scale. It explains that self-hosting offers control and data sovereignty at the cost of infrastructure and engineering overhead, while managed APIs provide turnkey, scalable access with per-character pricing. It also distinguishes open weight from open source models, covers licensing considerations, and offers criteria for evaluating voice quality, latency, reliability, and total cost of ownership.

  2. AWS Machine Learning Blog22

    Cost-optimizing AssemblyAI speech-to-text inference on AWS with Amazon EC2 Spot

    AssemblyAI runs GPU-based speech-to-text inference on Amazon ECS using a mix of EC2 Spot and On-Demand Instances across g4dn, g5, and g6 GPU families, with an Amazon SQS-based retry mechanism that returns in-flight jobs to the queue when a Spot Instance receives a 2-minute interruption notice. The architecture is deployed independently in us-west-2 and eu-west-2 for data residency, and AssemblyAI reports 70 percent cost savings on inference compute compared to On-Demand pricing while maintaining SLA commitments.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog24

    Oxford spent years studying how women build companies. Now this research can speak.

    Oxford Saïd Business School's Inspiring Female Founders initiative has turned its interview research into SOFIA for Business, a voice agent built on ElevenAgents and supported by the ElevenLabs Impact Program, launched at the Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Forum. SOFIA lets founders learn from previously interviewed women and also interviews new founders itself, adding each consented conversation to the research. It was co-founded by Pinar Ozcan, Amanda Slavin and Arabella Nyffenegger, with ElevenLabs providing free tool access through its Impact Program × Professors.

Nov 13Fri
  1. Apple Newsroom74

    Apple HomeView available today

    Apple announced that HomeView, a device that recognizes up to six people by face and shows their personal content in Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders, and Find My, is available to order today in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the U.S. for $299 (U.S.), with a wall-mounted version also at $299. It runs Siri AI, which offers onscreen awareness and, when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad, personal context and cross-app actions; Siri AI is available in beta in HomeView software version 27.2. HomeView is not for sale in the European Union because Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU, and Schneider Home mounts start at $59.95 (U.S.).

    Why it matters: The announcement details pricing, availability, and Siri AI features for a new Apple device, useful for readers tracking Apple's home products and regional AI rollout.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog22

    7 customer service skills every human and AI agent needs (with examples)

    This guide outlines seven customer service skills—communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, empathy, adaptability, personalization, and product knowledge—and explains how both human and AI agents apply each, citing a Zendesk study that more than 50% of customers switched to competitors after a single bad experience. It describes implementation steps including defining CX goals, choosing an agentic AI platform, architecting the agent workflow, and testing before deployment, and notes Gartner's projection that at least 70% of customers will start their customer journey using an AI interface by 2028. It also covers training and feedback through metrics such as CSAT, first contact resolution, and average handle time, and distinguishes hard from soft skills.

Nov 12Thu
  1. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenLabs brings free voice restoration to veterans, songwriters, and more patients

    ElevenLabs announced at its New York Summit that people with permanent voice loss can now get free access to ElevenMusic, launching with Songwriters of North America (SONA) to verify eligibility and distribute access. The company also named Wounded Warrior Project as an Impact Program partner and NYU Langone Health as a new 1 Million Voices partner, through which eligible patients can access free personalized voice restoration via Rusk Rehabilitation. The 1 Million Voices program, a $1 billion in-kind commitment, has already helped more than 11,000 people with conditions including ALS, MND, and head and neck cancer speak again in a voice that sounds like their own.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Voice cloning for content creators: Scale your content workflows with voice AI

    This guide explains how voice cloning turns a recorded voice sample into a digital replica that can narrate new scripts for videos, podcasts, courses, and social clips, covering the capture-modeling-generation process and the difference between Instant and Professional Voice Cloning. It lists criteria for choosing a tool—voice fidelity, delivery control, language coverage, consent safeguards, export options, and commercial licensing—and outlines workflows for podcasters, YouTube, short-form content, courses, and audio articles. It also describes ElevenLabs' consent confirmation, voice verification, restricted voices, and traceability safeguards, plus which plan tiers include cloning and commercial rights.

  3. Vapi Blog58

    Agent Loop is here: Better voice agents, every call

    Vapi has launched Agent Loop in early access, a self-improving harness on top of its voice agent platform that builds an agent from a plain prompt, scores every call against a business goal, clusters misses into issues, drafts and tests fixes, then ships them as experiments on a slice of live traffic with automatic rollback. It relies on primitives including Simulations and Traffic Splitting (available in the dashboard now) and Goals, Call Health and Experiments (coming soon), with human approval required before any change ships. GA is planned for early next year, and Vapi is taking waitlist signups ahead of VapiCon on November 11.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog60

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA expand collaboration to bring voice agents to enterprises and governments globally

    ElevenLabs and NVIDIA are expanding their partnership across models, infrastructure and sovereign deployments, with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL now available in ElevenAgents and ElevenLabs adding 15MW of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin compute. ElevenLabs models and NVIDIA infrastructure power a sovereign voice agent for Poland's national e-Health appointment system, and the companies are exploring on-device voice AI for robotics and physical AI.

    Why it matters: It shows how voice-agent stacks are being bundled with model and compute partnerships, and includes a concrete sovereign healthcare deployment with stated operational details.

  5. ElevenLabs Blog58

    Building the interaction layer for AI: Everything announced at ElevenLabs Summit NYC

    At its New York Summit, ElevenLabs announced new models, agents, and deployment options, including plans to fine-tune open-source language models and ElevenLabs voice models for businesses, a previewed Interaction Engine that manages turn-taking and selects LLMs per task, and ElevenAgents upgrades such as Memory and Routines. It also introduced ElevenAI, an app for enterprise teams that takes meeting notes and action items using Scribe v3, launched the ElevenLabs Partner Program and Marketplace, and announced an expanded NVIDIA partnership.

  6. ElevenLabs Blog22

    How enterprise clients are putting ElevenLabs AI to work

    ElevenLabs says enterprises now account for more than 55% of its revenue, with employees at nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies using its platform, which supports languages spoken natively by 5.5 billion people and 16,000 voices. The company detailed enterprise uses including Yahoo adding real-time voice to its Scout answer tool via ElevenAgents, Westgate Resorts deploying a voice agent named "Sarah" trained on 8,000 support transcripts, and KPN launching Mobiel AI for Dutch small businesses after fine-tuning raised identity-verification accuracy from roughly 50% to 90%. Other customers cited include Doppel for vishing simulations, Pocket for transcription, and Twilio integrating ElevenLabs voices into Conversation Relay.

  7. ElevenLabs Blog22

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs collaborate to take natural AI conversations to enterprise scale

    McKinsey and ElevenLabs announced an alliance combining McKinsey's industry and enterprise transformation expertise, underpinned by QuantumBlack's AI engineering, with ElevenLabs' conversational AI technology and ElevenAgents platform to help organizations prove value through initial use cases before scaling across the enterprise. Each deployment pairs multilingual conversational technology with agent design, systems integration and operating-model changes, and the companies cite KPN, the Dutch telecom company, as an early example using AI-powered solutions for customer interactions from order enquiries to technical appointment management. The alliance aims to extend beyond telecommunications to service-intensive industries such as insurance, supporting claims intake, policy servicing and everyday customer questions.

  8. ElevenLabs Blog42

    Introducing the ElevenLabs Marketplace for enterprise-ready AI applications

    ElevenLabs launched the ElevenLabs Marketplace, a curated collection of industry-specific AI and voice applications built on ElevenLabs by partners including Salesforce, IBM, NiCE, Twilio and Zendesk, spanning financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, retail and government. Enterprises can explore solutions and connect directly with the partners behind them, while ElevenLabs says it plans to let customers purchase eligible partner solutions through existing ElevenLabs commitments starting next year.

Nov 11Wed
  1. AWS Machine Learning Blog26

    Introducing usage-based pricing for Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming

    AWS announced usage-based metering for Amazon SageMaker AI bidirectional streaming inference, letting model providers report actual usage for AWS Marketplace software charges via a companion WebSocket metadata connection, while SageMaker AI endpoint infrastructure charges still apply. Deepgram is the launch partner, bringing usage-based Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech billing to AWS Marketplace. Model servers opt in with the X-Amzn-SageMaker-Metadata-Stream-Supported header and send JSON metering records with the inference.count dimension and ConsumedUnits.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog12

    WAV vs MP3: How to choose the right audio file format

    WAV is an uncompressed, lossless format best for recording, editing and archiving, while MP3 is compressed and lossy, producing much smaller files suited to sharing and streaming. One minute of CD-quality stereo audio is about 10.6 MB as WAV, versus about 0.96 MB as a 128 kbps MP3 and about 2.4 MB as a 320 kbps MP3. Converting MP3 to WAV makes the file larger but cannot restore the data lost during compression.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog65

    Introducing Scribe v3 and v3 Live, our most accurate speech to text models

    ElevenLabs launched Scribe v3 for recorded audio, which makes 27% fewer word errors than Scribe v2 across 102 languages and has the lowest diarization error of any model tested, and Scribe v3 Live for realtime audio, which makes 43% fewer semantic word errors than Scribe v2 Realtime and adds speaker diarization and improved turn detection. Scribe v3 Live is available today in ElevenAgents, and both models are available in ElevenAPI, where switching from Scribe v2 is a one-line change to the model ID (scribe_v3 or scribe_v3_live). Both run in the US by default with isolated EU, India, and Singapore environments, Zero Retention Mode, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, and HIPAA-eligible coverage.

    Why it matters: Useful for teams choosing speech-to-text models, since it details measured accuracy, diarization, and latency trade-offs plus deployment and compliance options.

  4. Google Developers Blog72

    On-Device Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech in Google AI Edge Gallery

    Google introduced on-device ASR and TTS in Google AI Edge Gallery, pairing lightweight speech models with on-device SLMs like Gemini Nano and Gemma 4 for fully offline voice interaction. ML Kit on Android offers multilingual transcription across 100+ languages at 10x real-time speed plus a few-step diffusion TTS that starts in ~100 ms, while MediaPipe Tasks and LiteRT bring cross-platform support for open-weight models including Parakeet-TDT 0.6B, PocketTTS 100M, Kokoro-82M, and Phonon 31M. The release powers the XR Language Teacher showcase and voice-enabled AI Chat, with open-source reference code on GitHub.

    Why it matters: It documents concrete on-device speech model releases, latency and accuracy figures, and open-source code that developers can use to build offline voice pipelines.

  5. OpenRouter Announcements58

    How to Build a Voice AI Agent

    This tutorial builds a Python restaurant-booking voice agent that chains speech-to-text, an LLM with tool calling, and text-to-speech through a single OpenRouter API key, streaming each completed sentence to TTS instead of waiting for the full reply. Across 12 turns in three test conversations, median server-side time to first audio was 1.9 seconds (1.4 seconds without tools, 2.4 seconds with a tool call), and a four-turn conversation cost about $0.013 per minute of processed speech at October 8 promotional prices, with TTS accounting for roughly 90% of model cost. It also compares STT, LLM and TTS models on accuracy, latency and price, and shows how to run the same agent with LiveKit Agents for live audio and interruptions.

Nov 10Tue
  1. ElevenLabs Blog12

    What is an API endpoint? A guide to connected software

    An API endpoint is the specific URL where an API receives requests and returns responses, with each route pairing an HTTP method with a resource path. The guide covers how endpoints process requests, REST methods like GET and POST, seven common API architectures, design best practices, testing and monitoring, and security through authentication, scoped permissions and concurrency-based rate limits, illustrated with ElevenAPI examples.

Nov 9Mon
  1. ElevenLabs Blog60

    ElevenAgents Campaign Manager works every contact to an outcome

    ElevenLabs introduces ElevenAgents Campaign Manager, which takes a list of contacts and a target outcome and runs outbound campaigns, following up over time and carrying context between calls until the outcome is reached or the contact asks to stop. It offers campaign analytics with per-contact decision timelines, a needs-attention queue, CSV export, and controls including calling windows, attempt limits, do-not-call lists and disclosures, and it uses existing ElevenAgents agents and phone numbers over phone calls, WhatsApp voice and WhatsApp messaging, with email and SMS coming soon.

    Why it matters: Announces a new outbound campaign product from ElevenLabs with beta customer results, so it is relevant to teams evaluating AI calling tools.

Nov 7Sat
  1. ElevenLabs Blog30

    Voice AI infrastructure: The 2026 stack explained

    This guide describes the layers of a production voice AI stack—speech recognition, turn-taking, language models, orchestration, tools and MCP, knowledge and memory, speech synthesis, telephony, and guardrails, testing, and monitoring—and explains how ElevenAgents implements each, using Eleven v4 as the example voice layer. It covers two build modes (Custom and Realtime), Scribe v2 Realtime transcription at roughly 150 ms, a proprietary turn-taking model, workflow orchestration nodes, MCP tool approval modes, RAG latency reduced from 326 ms to 155 ms, and Eleven v4 Turbo figures of about 100 ms inference latency and about 150 ms time to first speech. It also details Guardrails 2.0, simulation and tool-call tests, A/B experiments, and observability metrics.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Share your ElevenMusic creations directly to SoundCloud

    ElevenMusic launched a SoundCloud integration that lets users connect their SoundCloud account under Linked Accounts in profile settings, then add a description, genre, and tags to an original track and click "Save to SoundCloud" to upload it to their profile. SoundCloud Artist Pro members can get three months of ElevenMusic free, then $9.99/mo unless canceled; the offer is 18+, ends 31 Oct 2027, and terms apply.

  3. Cursor Changelog62

    Voice Chat with Agents

    Cursor now supports realtime voice calls with agents in the Agents Window, the IDE, on web, and in Cursor for iOS, letting you describe changes out loud, ask what an agent is working on, and hear updates as work progresses. Voice chat runs on Grok Voice with selectable voices including Ara, Eve, Leo, Rex, and Sal, and uses zero data retention when Privacy Mode is on. It is separate from dictation, which still converts speech to text in the chat input and toggles with Cmd+Shift+Space in the IDE.

    Why it matters: Useful for Cursor users who want to know how the new voice call feature differs from dictation and where it is available.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog30

    Ads Engine adds human review from localization experts and creative specialists

    ElevenLabs Ads Engine now lets teams have ElevenLabs localization experts and creative specialists review ads made in the tool, including new variants and localizations for markets where no team member speaks the language. Ads Engine connects to ad platforms, pulls existing creative, translates text, adapts images and dubs video, with linguists from ElevenProductions and in-house creative specialists reviewing before ads are finalized. It uses Brand Kit to apply colors, fonts, logos, reference images and rules across variants, and can return finished creative for approval or push it directly to ad platforms.

Nov 6Fri
  1. ElevenLabs Blog55

    Give your Unity NPCs a voice with ElevenAgents

    ElevenLabs released an ElevenAgents Unity SDK that connects a Unity scene to an ElevenLabs voice agent, listening through the player's microphone, playing the agent's voice through an AudioSource, and running the session via the Conversation API. The same code runs in the Editor, desktop builds, and WebGL, with iOS, Android, and XR in beta. The SDK supports dynamic variables, overrides, contextual updates, client tools, and main-thread events, and is installed via the git URL https://github.com/elevenlabs/unity.git#v0.1.0.

  2. Hugging Face Blog22

    Egyptian and Nigerian English join the Open ASR Leaderboard

    The Open ASR Leaderboard added two private conversational splits from Liva AI covering Egyptian English (1.34 h) and Nigerian English (1.55 h), both punctuated, cased and containing disfluencies. The leaderboard now reports a richer accent breakdown based on Kachru's Three Circles, comparing US vs. non-US and Inner Circle vs. Outer and Expanding Circles. The post says the additions continue efforts to improve accent and language representation and trust through new private data and providers.

  3. Manus Blog25

    Best AI Tools for Game Development in 2026: Our Top 10 Picks

    This guide compares ten AI tools for game development, splitting them into four that build games (GDevelop, Unity's AI tools, Manus, Rosebud AI) and six that handle specific jobs like code, art, audio, and characters (Cursor, Scenario, Ludo.ai, Meshy, ElevenLabs, Convai). Each entry lists key features, developer feedback from Reddit and reviews, pros and cons, and monthly USD pricing as of November 4, 2026. The article concludes that most real projects mix tools and that larger games still need human direction and testing.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog15

    SRT file guide: Create, edit, and use subtitles in video

    This guide explains that an SRT file is a plain-text subtitle format storing numbered blocks, each pairing a start and end timestamp with on-screen caption text, and that it is widely supported across players and editing software. It covers the format's structure with an example, how to open SRT files on any device, converting transcripts to SRT via speech to text, editing to fix timing and readability errors, adding subtitles to video, and choosing between SRT and WebVTT. It also notes ElevenCreative and ElevenAPI options for generating and exporting subtitle files, including the Scribe v2 model's word-level timestamps across over 90 languages.

Nov 5Thu
  1. Hugging Face Blog71

    A Closer Look at Phonon TTS. Launching High-Quality On-Device Speech That Tops the Benchmarks.

    Gradium details Phonon, a small on-device text-to-speech model released two weeks ago that needs no server or network, with Phonon 31m (English) under Apache 2.0 and Phonon 40m covering English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese under a non-commercial license. The models, about 65 MB and 75 MB, offer over 100 built-in voices plus voice cloning and voice design, and on Hugging Face's Open TTS Leaderboard Phonon ranks first in German and Spanish on intelligibility and tops the CPU streaming benchmark on time-to-first audio. The post also covers the ptts inference framework, Transformers integration from v5.21, launch demos, and more than 200,000 downloads in the first two weeks.

    Why it matters: It offers a detailed look at how a small on-device TTS model was built, benchmarked and integrated into developer tooling.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog22

    Fix speech to text accuracy problems with a smarter workflow

    This guide explains that speech to text accuracy depends on audio input quality, speaker dynamics, and lexical and contextual issues, and that fixes should target the input, processing, or output stage of the pipeline. It recommends recording at 16 kHz or higher in lossless formats with microphones four to six inches from the speaker, using voice isolation, diarization or multichannel recording, and keyterm prompting, and measuring accuracy with word error rate. It also notes that ElevenAPI offers Scribe v2 with keyterm prompting, multichannel transcription, and speaker diarization.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog22

    AI voice agent pricing: What it costs for your business

    AI voice agent pricing combines three line items: the platform that runs the agent, the LLM that powers each conversation, and the telephony provider that connects calls. Using ElevenAgents pricing as an example, every paid tier works out to $0.08 per platform minute, with LLM and telephony billed separately at cost, and plans ranging from a free tier with 15 minutes per month to custom Enterprise pricing. The guide also covers concurrency limits, ROI calculation against staffing costs, hidden costs, and ways to reduce spend.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenAgents integrates natively with leading contact center platforms to deliver enterprise-ready agents

    ElevenAgents now integrates natively with NiCE CXone, Genesys Cloud, Amazon Connect, and Five9, and connects over SIP to any other contact center or PBX that supports SIP trunking. The voice stack, built from ElevenLabs' own audio research, offers more than 17,000 voices in over 90 languages, passes call context from the contact center to the agent, and hands calls back to human agents through existing routing with full context. The company says this lets enterprises automate routine calls without replacing their telephony, routing, compliance recording, or CRM systems.

Nov 4Wed
  1. ElevenLabs Blog18

    What is call transcription? A practical business guide

    Call transcription converts phone or video calls into written text, typically via AI speech-to-text models, either after recording or in real time. Businesses use transcripts for searchable records, quality assurance and coaching, compliance documentation, and CRM logging. Legality depends on jurisdiction, with some regions requiring one-party consent and others all-party consent.

  2. AWS Machine Learning Blog38

    Building ultra-low-latency voice AI applications on AWS

    This AWS post explains how Cartesia, an AWS Partner, uses State Space Models (SSMs) and AWS infrastructure to deliver sub-100ms text-to-speech (Sonic) and speech-to-text (Ink) at global scale. It details two deployment patterns for Sonic: an Amazon SageMaker AI model package via AWS Marketplace running in-VPC, and self-managed containers on EC2 GPU instances, and describes Cartesia's voice models operating inside Amazon Connect.

Nov 3Tue
  1. ElevenLabs Blog38

    Angle Health’s ElevenAgents pilot handles 90% of provider calls without a transfer

    Angle Health, an AI-native health benefits technology company, piloted ElevenAgents voice agents for provider-service workflows, answering calls in eight languages and working directly with its core administration system. During the pilot, the agents handled about 80% of total provider call volume, with more than 90% resolved end to end without transferring to a person, and the provider team gained back nearly 9,000 minutes a day. Angle Health plans to expand the pilot to its commercial, brokerage and account management segments.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog20

    How are synthetic voices created for natural speech?

    Synthetic voices are built by training neural AI models on large datasets of real human speech, then generating audio from text or cloning a specific speaker from recorded samples. Modern systems sound natural because they replicate prosody and interpret context rather than stitching together individual words or syllables. Voices can also be designed from a text description alone, without any recording.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog30

    How KPN is bringing voice AI to the Netherlands' entrepreneurs with Mobiel AI

    KPN partnered with ElevenLabs to build Mobiel AI, an add-on to KPN EEN MKB mobile subscriptions that offers voicemail transcription, call summaries and transcripts with follow-up actions, and call routing and reachability settings. KPN said ElevenLabs stood out for speech quality and conversational AI in Dutch, and the teams raised verification accuracy from roughly 50% to 90%. Mobiel AI runs on KPN's network and data centers, with voice data staying in the Netherlands and customer data not used to train AI models or shared with third parties.

Oct 31Sat
  1. ElevenLabs Blog20

    Warm transfer vs cold transfer: choosing the right call

    This article compares warm transfers, where the receiving party gets the caller's context before connecting, with cold (blind) transfers, which pass no advance context, and describes a middle "tepid" transfer that dials the destination without a conference or live introduction. It recommends warm transfers for complex, sensitive or high-value calls and cold transfers for simple, high-volume routing, and details how ElevenAgents' transfer_to_number tool supports Conference, Blind and SIP REFER transfer types, including client_message and agent_message parameters and no-answer fallbacks.

  2. Hugging Face Blog36

    nemotron-halloween

    The author describes MonsterHouse, a Halloween interactive projection built on the NVIDIA Nemotron Voice Agent with Nemotron Speech ASR, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB, Magpie TTS Zeroshot and Audio2Face-3D, running on a single workstation with two RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs. The grumpy pirate-ship garage door listens to trick-or-treaters, replies through a LoRA-tuned Bolt E4B model, speaks in a zero-shot Magpie voice with seven moods, and animates its mouth in Unreal Engine 5 via Audio2Face-3D, with optional Nemotron 3 Nano Omni costume descriptions plus YOLO and ByteTrack visitor tracking. The MonsterHouse code is not released, but the post outlines a build path using the open models and reports median end-of-speech-to-audio of 1.70 seconds with Bolt Q4 and TTS, or 0.72 seconds for cached responses.

Oct 30Fri
  1. ElevenLabs Blog38

    TELUS Digital cut early cancellations by more than half with ElevenAgents

    TELUS Digital built an outbound voice agent on ElevenAgents that calls new home internet customers within their first 90 days to explain their first bill, introduce self-serve tools, and prompt bundling discounts. Among customers who received a call, 30-day cancellations were less than half the rate of the broader new-customer cohort, with calls rated 8.5 out of 10 on average and C$55,000 in lifetime revenue retained per 1,000 customers reached. The agent was live in about six weeks from initial vendor engagement, and five additional use cases are now in active development.