Microsoft’s homegrown AI debut

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. For years, Microsoft’s AI strategy has been synonymous with OpenAI — but that narrative just got complicated.

The corporate’s latest MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview models mark its first homegrown AI, signaling a shift that might throw yet one more wrench into the AI world’s most-watched partnership.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST with The Rundown’s AI Educator, Nate Grahek — join and learn all the most recent suggestions and tricks for getting essentially the most out of ChatGPT. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Microsoft releases homegrown AI

• OpenAI’s gpt-realtime for voice agents

• Create an AI agent to handle email support

• Cohere’s SOTA enterprise translation model

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

🤖 Microsoft releases homegrown AI

The Rundown: Microsoft just introduced MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, marking its first fully in-house AI models and coming after years of counting on OpenAI’s technology in a turbulent partnership.

The small print:

• MAI-Voice-1 is a speech generation model able to generating a minute of speech in under a second, already integrated into Copilot Each day and Podcasts.

• MAI-1-preview is a text-based model trained on a fraction of the GPUs of rivals, specializing in instruction following and on a regular basis queries.

• CEO Mustafa Suleyman said MAI-1 is “up there with a few of the very best models on this planet”, though benchmarks have yet to be publicly released.

• The text model is currently being tested on LM Arena and via API, with Microsoft saying it should roll out in “certain text use cases” in the approaching weeks.

Why it matters: Microsoft’s shift toward constructing in-house models introduces a brand new dynamic to its OAI partnership, also positioning it to raised control its own AI destiny. While we await benchmarks and more real-world testing for a greater understanding, the tech giant looks able to pave its own path as an alternative of being viewed as OAI’s sidekick.

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

👋 Meet Auggie CLI

The Rundown: Augment Code is bringing the ability of its AI coding agent and context engine right to your terminal with Auggie CLI, now generally available.

From standalone terminal sessions to each piece of your dev stack, with Auggie CLI, you possibly can:

• Construct features and debug issues

• Get easy feedback suggestions to your PRs and builds

• Triage customer issues and alerts out of your observability stack

• Construct with the AI coding platform that gets you, your team, and your code

Try Auggie CLI today.

OPENAI

🗣️ OpenAI’s gpt-realtime for voice agents

The Rundown: OpenAI moved its Realtime API out of beta, also introducing a brand new gpt-realtime speech-to-speech model and latest developer tools like image input and Model Context Protocol server integrations.

The small print:

• gpt-realtime features nuanced abilities like detecting nonverbal cues and switching languages while keeping a naturally flowing conversation.

• The model achieves 82.8% accuracy on audio reasoning benchmarks, an enormous increase over the 65.6% rating from its predecessor.

• OpenAI also added MCP support, allowing voice agents to attach with external data sources and tools without custom integrations.

• gpt-realtime may also handle image inputs like photos or screenshots, giving the voice agent the flexibility to reason on visuals alongside the conversation.

Why it matters: The mainstream adoption of voice agents looks like an inevitability, and OpenAI’s additions of upgraded human conversational abilities and integrations like MCP and image understanding bring much more functionality for enterprises and devs to plug directly into customer support channels or customized voice applications.

AI TRAINING

✉️ Create an AI agent to handle email support

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn construct an AI agent that routinely triages incoming emails, tags team members in Slack, and drafts skilled responses, turning your overwhelming inbox into an organized workflow.

Step-by-step:

2. Click Copilot and paste: “Day by day at 9 AM PST, retrieve all emails from the last 24 hours. Classify as: Spam, Auto-replies, PR/Marketing, Customer Support, Feedback, or General Inquiry”

3. Add team tagging rules customized to your team members to funnel to specific departments or responsibilities

4. Click “Add tools” and connect Gmail, Slack, and your FAQ URLs — grant full permissions for autonomous operation

5. Test together with your current inbox, confirm categorization accuracy, then enable the each day schedule

Pro tip: Feed your agent FAQ URLs, Notion docs, and former support threads within the instructions. The more context you provide, the higher it handles edge cases and knows exactly who to loop in.

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With StackAI’s toolkit, you’ll get:

• Drag and drop platform + ship as chatbots, forms, apps

• Built-in PII protections, guardrails, audit trails, SSO, and compliance

• Seamless integrations with 100+ tools you already use

Download 10+ ready-to-deploy AI agents now.

COHERE

🌍 Cohere’s SOTA enterprise translation model

The Rundown: Cohere introduced Command AI Translate, a brand new enterprise model that claims top scores on key translation benchmarks while allowing for deep customization and secure, private deployment options.

The small print:

• Command A Translate outperforms rivals like GPT-5, DeepSeek-V3, and Google Translate on key benchmarks across 23 major business languages.

• The model also features an optional ‘Deep Translation’ agentic workflow that double-checks complex and high-stakes content, boosting performance.

• Cohere offers customization for industry-specific terms, letting pharmaceutical corporations teach their drug names or banks add their financial terminology.

• Corporations may also install it on their very own servers, keeping contracts, medical records, and confidential emails completely offline and secure.

Why it matters: Security has been one among the largest issues for corporations wanting to leverage AI tools, and global enterprises face a selection of uploading sensitive documents to the cloud or paying for time-consuming human translators. Cohere’s model gives businesses customizable translation in-house without data privacy risks.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Google Vids – Create and edit videos with AI-powered tools

• 🔊 MAI-Voice-1 – Microsoft’s latest in-house voice generation model

• 🗣️ gpt-realtime – OpenAI’s latest advanced speech-to-speech model

• 🥁 HunyuanVideo-Foley – Open-source model for professional-grade audio

📰 All the things else in AI today

Free Event: The Way forward for AI Agents in Coding with Guy Gur-Ari & Igor Ostrovsky, co-founders of Augment Code. Ask them anything today in r/webdev.*

xAI released Grok Code Fast 1, a brand new advanced coding model (previously launched under the codename sonic) that features very low costs for agentic coding tasks.

Anthropic published a brand new threat report revealing that cybercriminals exploited its Claude Code platform to automate a multi-million dollar extortion scheme.

OpenAI rolled out latest features for its Codex software development tool, including an extension to run in IDEs, code reviews, CLI agentic upgrades, and more.

Krea introduced a waitlist for a brand new Realtime Video feature, enabling users to create and edit video using canvas painting, text, or live webcam feeds with consistency.

Tencent open-sourced HunyuanVideo-Foley, a brand new model that creates professional-grade soundtracks and effects with SOTA audio-visual synchronization.

TIME Magazine released its 2025 TIME100 AI list, featuring lots of the top CEOs, researchers, and thought leaders across the industry.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Scott M. in Franklin, TN:

“My client was using a legacy version of QuickBooks Desktop, which lacked the feature for sending automated follow-up emails for overdue invoices. To deal with this, I built a custom automation using Zapier AI: the workflow logs into the accounting email, IDs invoices which can be greater than 60 days overdue, and follows the invoice link to confirm whether it has been paid. If payment has not been made, the automation sends a reminder email stating that the invoice is late and includes the unique payment link. Every communication includes the accounting department, ensuring they stay informed about delinquent payments.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The AI app power rankings

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Klarna gets a $14B reality check

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Nvidia’s palm-sized robot brain

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create an AI agent to handle email support

• RSVP to our next workshop today at 4 PM EST: Essential ChatGPT suggestions

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown