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

Cartesia has released Sonic-3.6, a streaming text-to-speech model built on state space models rather than transformers. It now ranks #1 on both Artificial Analysis speech leaderboards — 1,283 Elo on Provider Voice and 1,123 on Controlled Voice, the board that clones every model onto the same eight reference voices to isolate the synthesis engine. Cartesia states sub-90ms time-to-first-audio. The…