Cartesia Ships Sonic-3.6: A Streaming TTS Model That Now Leads Both Artificial Analysis Speech Arenas

Cartesia has released Sonic-3.6, a text-to-speech model built on state space architecture instead of the transformer models common in the industry. The update has moved the model to the top of both the Provider Voice and Controlled Voice leaderboards maintained by Artificial Analysis. This development demonstrates a shift in performance capabilities for non-transformer architectures in synthetic speech generation.