Audio API launches, Oct 1-8 2026: dates, prices and what Sume covers

Between September 28 and October 8, 2026, the audio news was dominated by Microsoft's three-model voice launch on October 1, ElevenLabs' v4 on September 28, Suno's Speech beta on October 1, and a run of smaller open and on-device releases. Of these, Sume lists none of the new vendor models. Its audio coverage is Cartesia Sonic for TTS, Lyria for music, and Scribe v2 behind STT.

Each row below carries the date, the headline number the vendor or the news report published, and a Sume column from the repository docs.

Calendar

All numbers are as published by the source named in Sources; dates are release or report dates.

• Sume lists Cartesia Sonic (sonic-3.6, sonic-3.5, sonic-3, sonic-latest, sonic-preview) on the TTS Router.
• Sume Music Router lists sume/music-auto, lyria-3.5 and lyria-3-pro.
• Sume STT is one hosted endpoint, with a 10-minute limit.

Use the calendar in four steps

• Mark the releases that touch a product you ship.
• Open each vendor page and confirm the price still stands.
• Test one script or clip on the new model before changing anything.
• Re-run your cost sheet and log the date you did it.

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/tts-router/generate",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SUME_API_KEY']}",
        "Idempotency-Key": "tts-demo-001",
    },
    json={
        "model": "sonic-3.6",
        "transcript": "Welcome back. Today we compare three prices.",
        "voice": {"id": os.environ["SUME_VOICE_ID"]},
        "timestamps": {"words": True},
    },
    timeout=30,
)
r.raise_for_status()
print(r.json())

How to read a launch week

A launch date is not an availability date. Microsoft lists the new models on Foundry, Vercel, OpenRouter and Azure Voice Live; Suno's Speech is a beta; Phonon-2 is a download. Each has a different route to your product, and each route has its own limits.

Prices also move after launch. ElevenLabs' v4 launch discount ends on October 12, Microsoft's transcribe price is introductory through the end of 2026, and Google's pricing page says rates rise 50% on January 1. A calendar that lists only the launch price will mislead you in a month, so date every number and revisit the rows that carry an end date.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not add a vendor model on the day it launches. Sume TTS covers Cartesia Sonic only. The router has no Eleven, OpenAI, Gemini, MAI or Inworld engines, no streaming TTS, and no routing presets. Jobs are asynchronous, and any audio over 1,200 seconds fails with tts_duration_exceeded. Where a release is in a news report rather than the vendor's page, the figures come from that report, and I could not confirm Microsoft's numbers on a Microsoft page.

Further reading

See the video launches of the same week for the video side, and the music router catalog.