ServiceNow
ServiceNow previews Apriel Voice, an open model that listens and calls tools
Apriel Voice 27B Preview takes speech in and returns answers and tool calls in one model, and its makers say plainly where a human should check the work.
ServiceNow has released a preview of Apriel Voice 27B, an open model that takes spoken requests, reasons about them and calls tools to complete the task. The technical report was published on 29 October 2026, and the weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT licence.
How it is built
Apriel Voice connects a Whisper large-v3-turbo speech encoder to Gemma 4 26B-A4B, a mixture-of-experts language model, through a learned projector. It accepts speech, text, images and tool results in one conversation and returns text and structured tool calls. It doesn’t speak: you pair it with a separate speech synthesiser, and ServiceNow used Cartesia’s Sonic 3.5 in its evaluations. Because one model handles listening, reasoning and tool use, there is no separate dialogue model in the middle.
Against closed voice systems
ServiceNow compares it with proprietary speech-to-speech systems and open pipelines on English voice-agent tests (EVA accuracy, EVA experience, τ-Voice task success, and mean latency):
- Apriel Voice 27B Preview: 51.27, 74.13, 65.51, 1.91 seconds.
- GPT Realtime 2.1: 59.03, 61.6, 69.82, 1.55 seconds.
- Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking: 54.82, 73.5, 84.19, 1.50 seconds.
- The strongest open three-stage pipeline in the table, Parakeet with Gemma 4 26B: 39.97, 3.93, 67.78, 3.01 seconds.
It trails the closed systems on accuracy, task success and latency, beats them on the experience score, and is well ahead of the other open options on accuracy and experience. ServiceNow’s serving recipe uses four GPUs, and it reports about twice the throughput on an optimised setup with four H100s.
Outputs and tool calls can be incorrect or biased. Validate actions and factual claims, and apply human oversight where errors have significant consequences.
What it means for your business
Voice is where many small businesses lose work: missed calls, after-hours enquiries, bookings scribbled on paper. A voice agent that can call tools, such as checking a calendar, making a booking or updating a customer record, closes that gap. Open models like this one also mean a voice agent can be hosted where you choose, which matters when calls carry personal information.
ServiceNow’s own warning is the right operating rule. Let the agent handle the routine part of the call, and route anything with consequences, such as refunds, cancellations or complaints, to a person with the transcript attached. Fulcrum Lyre, our voice product, is built for that same job of calling, qualifying and booking. Whatever answers your phones, judge it on whether the task gets done and how cleanly it hands over to your team.
Sources
General information only, not legal, financial or professional advice. Check the sources for your circumstances.