Cartesia Ships Sonic-3.6: A Streaming TTS Model That Now Leads Both Artificial Analysis Speech Arenas
Cartesia has released Sonic-3.6 , the newest version of its real-time text-to-speech model. It arrives roughly three months after Sonic-3.5. The new change is naturalness, and this one is independently checkable. Sonic 3.6 now holds #1 on both Artificial Analysis speech leaderboards — 1,283 Elo on the Provider Voice board and 1,123 on the Controlled Voice board . The second result matters more. That board clones every model onto the same eight reference voices, which isolates the synthesis engine from the voice catalog. Sonic-3.6 leads it, with Sonic-3.5 second and ElevenLabs Eleven v3 third. The model runs on state space models rather than transformers, and Cartesia states sub-90ms time-to-first-audio. It is available in beta . Is it deployable? YES, it is available in beta and as a hosted API. Not as self-hosted weights. Sonic is a closed, commercial model. There are no open weights and no Hugging Face repo. You rent it. Company level : Solo developers and star...
