Realtime whats new

Write the May 2026 issue of What's New for Developers, the monthly developer update from Sonora Realtime, Sonora's real-time voice infrastructure product. Recipients are developers who opted in to the Sonora Realtime developer list. The issue opens with a greeting to Sonora Realtime developers and the line that this month's roundup follows. Sonora Realtime is at https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/realtime

Product Changelog, two entries:

• Deploy and run voice agents in India. Agents can now be deployed on Sonora Realtime Cloud to the new Mumbai, India region (ap-south) and use co-located Dictate 3 speech-to-text models through Sonora Inference. Co-locating the model and the agent lowers latency for users in India and surrounding regions. Automatic routing: Sonora Inference routes requests to the Mumbai Dictate 3 deployment when the model and language match a supported configuration, with no code changes. Built for India-based experiences: shorter round trips and support for local language configurations, including Hindi, on supported models. Region page: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/realtime/regions/mumbai. Guide to building performant voice agents in India: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/guides/voice-agents-india. Co-located Dictate 3 models in the US and EU regions are coming soon.
• sonora-realtime-agents 2.3. This release focuses on stability: more granular observability controls, fixed edge-case hangs, and improved reliability under load. STT and TTS fallback, shutdown, and logging behavior are more predictable. The record parameter on AgentSession.start() now supports granular options to record everything, record nothing, or record audio only without logs, traces, or transcripts. Release notes: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/changelog/realtime-agents-2-3

Content and Community Highlights, four entries:

• Complete workshop: Sonora Realtime 101. A video workshop series in which Priya Natarajan walks through the end-to-end fundamentals of building voice agents in Python and the production patterns for shipping faster, debugging issues, and keeping agents reliable. Series: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/realtime-101. The one-hour full course ends with a working voice agent that runs locally: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/realtime-101/full-course
• The Sonora Developer Community is live. New developer community forums for technical support and discussion with other Sonora developers, where people ask questions, share what they are building, and get help from the Sonora team and the community. https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/community
• Halcyon TTS 1.5. Now available across Sonora Realtime through Sonora Inference (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/inference/tts/halcyon), Agent Builder (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/agent-builder), and the Agents SDK plugin (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/plugins/halcyon-tts). The model suits low-latency voice pipelines and handles structured text such as dates, phone numbers, and email addresses. Sonora Inference includes Halcyon's default voices; cloned voices need the plugin with a Halcyon API key, and cloned voices through Sonora Inference are coming soon. Demo: Marcus Oyelaran let an agent run his tabletop role-playing campaign with Halcyon TTS, at https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/demos/tabletop-agent
• Video avatars for Sonora Realtime agents. The Lumen avatar plugin generates a real-time video avatar from a single image and streams it into a Sonora Realtime room: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/avatars/lumen. Priya Natarajan's salary negotiation coach demo shows it in action: https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/demos/negotiation-coach

Sonora Realtime in the Wild, two entries:

• Voice AI for healthcare. Clinic Notes is a project built by a team at the Harborline Hackathon that uses Sonora Realtime agents to listen to a patient visit and generate structured outputs such as clinical notes and referrals. https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/community/showcase/clinic-notes
• Voice AI on smart glasses. A community demo runs a Sonora Realtime agent on a pair of developer smart glasses. https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/community/showcase/wearable-assistant

Event: Voice Infra Meetup. Wednesday, May 27, 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, at Sonora HQ, 12 Harbor Mill, Brooklyn. An expert panel on what it takes to run voice agents in production, with speakers from Sonora, Cobalt Cloud, and Larkspur, plus food and drinks. https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/events/voice-infra-meetup

Set the date, time, and venue apart from the body copy as short lines, with one link to the event page.

The issue closes with Happy hacking and a Let's build together block with four links: the developer community (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/community), the docs (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs), the blog (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog), and the video library (https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/realtime-101).

Reference artwork: assets.illustrations.realtimeDevBanner for the masthead, assets.illustrations.realtime101Thumb for the workshop, assets.illustrations.halcyonDemoThumb for the Halcyon demo.

The footer states that the recipient opted in to the Sonora Realtime developer list, gives the postal address, and links to https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/privacy, https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/terms, and https://sonora-email.s3.amazonaws.com/unsubscribe

Dark mode should be supported.

Use /world/sonora-email for brand chrome and CSS. Use the absolute HTTPS URLs from tokens.json; do not use /world/ paths as image src.

Leave the HTML in output/email.html, a plain-text version in output/email.txt, and the subject in output/meta.json as {"subject": "..."}. Don't include From, To, or Date headers.