Jake Downie

[Bland @usebland]

Got AWS commit left to spend before end of year? Spend it on voice AI agents that answer your phones.

Bland is now on AWS Marketplace, and eligible purchases can count toward your AWS commitment.

Learn more: https://t.co/ilzAfPG6yA

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@kanjun That UI scheme / color scheme is very slack haha.

[Bland @usebland]

Every voice AI vendor looks good running your easiest call.

@zaygranet's advice: start by automating simple calls like status checks, but test the vendor on your hardest one before you sign. A platform that handles FAQs well can still fail when a customer needs something complicated.

@KIN spent over six months getting another AI vendor to production quality. Bland got them there in less than one.

[Bland @usebland]

@OpenAI's Dot has its own computer, a browser, and 4,000+ apps.

Now, with Bland's Agent Phone Plan, your Dot can:

- Pick up when someone calls
- Make the calls you keep putting off
- Text you when it's done

Unlimited calls and unlimited texts. Give your Dot a phone number today.

https://t.co/6jdT2D2J6t

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@mbguercio @usebland @bot Mind emailing me at [email protected]? I'd like to understand what you tried and what went wrong.

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@s_ambrozio @mbguercio @usebland @bot Hm, I just pushed some updates to improve the default prompting and voices grokbot will pick. Mind emailing me at [email protected]? I'd like to understand what you tried and what went wrong.

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@Henry80085 @usebland @bot Hey! it should be easy, if you tell it to read the bland MCP docs it should approve it quick. Could you email me at [email protected] with a screenshot of what went wrong? would like to make sure this flow becomes painless

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@kuperix @usebland @bot Yes, you can do it with a webhook call, you can have something like a "poll updates" api endpoint which you tell the agent to call occasionally, whatever the api returns will get injected into the context.

Though this is actually a great feature idea! I'll see if I can ship it!

[Bland @usebland]

Give your Grok Bot a $3 phone plan

To celebrate Grok @bot's 3 days of livestreaming, your first month of the Agent Phone Plan is $3. Available for 3 days only.

Setup now takes under a minute. Start with our Grok Bot template:
https://t.co/aycR5O8lQA

This phone plan give Grok Bot:
- A dedicated phone number
- the ability to send and receive texts
- a voice to make inbound and outbound calls

[matt palmer @mattyp]

Giving Grok Bot a Phone

00:19 Installing Dialbot
00:54 Bland voice setup
02:39 Why use a calling agent?
03:20 Live demo call
04:50 Reviewing the transcript and cost
05:38 Chaining bots

@Bot can do anything you can - this is one way to make calls

[DesignArena @DesignArena]

https://t.co/8x3QbWhJ5Z

[DesignArena @DesignArena]

BREAKING: Bland Speech v3 by @usebland debuts as the most human-sounding TTS model on our newest evaluation: Audio Realism Bench.

Traditional speech benchmarks increasingly struggle to separate frontier systems that all sound clean, fluent, and intelligible.

Audio Realism Bench instead asks a harder question: when two voices read the same transcript, which one sounds more like a real person?

Vetted native speakers evaluate recordings blindly across phone agents, conversational assistants, and spoken explainers, judging the subtle qualities that define human-like speech.

We also place real human recordings directly into the evaluation pool, testing whether evaluators can distinguish TTS models from actual human speech.

Bland Speech v3 takes the top spot in our initial rankings, followed by MAI-Voice-2 by @MicrosoftAI and Grok TTS by @spacexai, all demonstrating important steps toward voice systems capable of sustaining genuinely human-feeling interactions.

Congratulations to the @usebland team!

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@usebland I will C you later!

[Bland @usebland]

Yesterday, we announced that we closed our Series C. Hear from our CEO, Isaiah Granet, about what this means for the team:

[Bland @usebland]

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve closed our Series C and raised $100M to continue automating the world’s most complex phone calls.

We grabbed some guy named Paul to talk about it because nobody else in the office wanted to. 🧵

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

hey
@andon_open_air
how's it going?

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@andon_open_air How much are you spending on TTS characters right now for your station? (Per 1k generated characters). https://t.co/gGjt6qT0v7 is launching a new TTS model we developed and think we could cut your current TTS provider rates in half.

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@andon_thinking How much are you spending on TTS characters right now for your station? (Per 1k generated characters). https://t.co/gGjt6qT0v7 is launching a new TTS model we developed and think we could cut your current TTS provider rates in half.

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

@andon_backlink How much are you spending on TTS characters right now for your station? (Per 1k generated characters). https://t.co/gGjt6qT0v7 is launching a new TTS model we developed and think we could cut your current TTS provider rates in half.

[Jake Downie @JakeDownie25150]

people say non-technical like its a protected class