Speechmatics And Livekit Target The Accuracy Gap Breaking Voice Agents In Production

Linden, Speechmatics’ new speech-to-text model, is available now through LiveKit Inference, enabling developers to build reliable voice agents at scale across 55+ languages.

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, Aug. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- From today, developers building voice agents on LiveKit Inference can switch to Speechmatics in less than a minute through the UI or code. Linden, the first Speechmatics model purpose-built for voice agents, is available through LiveKit Inference, LiveKit's platform for using leading voice AI models from one place. That means no separate API key, account or invoice.

In a demo scenario, a voice agent typically hears one speaker, clean audio and a short exchange where all STT providers perform well. Real-world production is rarely that tidy: a caller with a strong accent, a noisy cafe, a 16-digit card number read out over a low quality phone line. When the transcript breaks on the words that matter, everything downstream breaks with it.

Together, LiveKit and Linden solve that problem for the builder. Linden gets the words right where it is hardest: 55+ languages, non-native speakers and strong accents, and alphanumerics such as account and card numbers read out over a bad line. LiveKit Inference handles the pipeline, the routing, the billing and the turn detection that decides when the agent speaks. Adopting a speech provider used to take weeks, now it’s something you can simply select.

“What separates an agent people trust from one they find exhausting is whether it can understand what you said. Our new model solves for this. Linden not only excels at 55+ languages, but also transcribing non-native speakers, dialects, and accents. LiveKit built the infrastructure that made those deployments possible, and its community has worked out what production voice AI actually takes, in the real world, faster than anyone else."
Ricardo Herreros-Symons, CRO, Speechmatics

Norwegian conversational AI company boost.ai already runs Speechmatics and LiveKit in production across the voice agents it builds for European enterprises, on infrastructure that also powers xAI Grok and Salesforce Agentforce.

"Voice agents live or die on the STT layer. Speechmatics gives us what actually matters in production: low-latency real-time models, fast iteration on the hard edges like alphanumerics and end-of-utterance, and serious language breadth across Europe. Just as importantly, the people behind it are a pleasure to work with; close, hands-on, and genuinely invested in getting things right."
Rasmus Hauch, CTO, boost.ai

LiveKit Inference, launched in October 2025, lets developers build a voice agent in minutes. A single API key calls the most popular STT, LLM and TTS models, and models swap with a one-line code change. Consolidated billing, rate-limit management and usage reporting all run through LiveKit Cloud. Speechmatics is available natively through LiveKit Inference, via the Speechmatics plugin for LiveKit Agents Open Source framework or through LiveKit’s Agent Builder.

"LiveKit Inference exists so developers can ship and iterate fast, without the headache of managing API keys or rewriting their stack every time a model changes. Adding Speechmatics equips voice agents with exceptional speaker diarization that clearly tracks who said what with any number of speakers from day one. This capability is especially powerful for physical AI and real-world multi-speaker environments."
David Zhao, CTO & Co-founder, LiveKit

Learn more: LiveKit Inference: livekit.com/products/inference
Launch announcement: livekit.com/blog/introducing-livekit-inference
Developer docs: docs.livekit.io/agents/models/inference
How to use Speechmatics STT with LiveKit Agents: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/stt/speechmatics/

About Speechmatics: Speechmatics builds the most accurate and inclusive speech recognition in the world, trusted by enterprises across financial services, media, contact centers and government for unmatched language coverage, accuracy, and flexibility.

About LiveKit: LiveKit is the open source framework and cloud platform for voice, video, and physical AI agents. Used by developers and enterprises worldwide, LiveKit powers realtime, multimodal AI applications at scale — from customer support and telephony to robotics and consumer products. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at livekit.com. Media Contact Mieke Smith // mieke.smith@speechmatics.com