In a single 48-hour stretch, Apple revealed plans to open Siri to rival chatbots, Mistral shipped an open-source voice model rivaling ElevenLabs, Google launched studio-quality AI music generation, and IBM embedded voice AI into enterprise agents. The chat window got AI onto our screens — voice and audio are how it escapes into the rest of our lives. The companies that dominate the next phase of AI won't be the ones with the best text completions; they'll be the ones that sound the most human.