Introducing Turtles

Shopping once felt like magic.

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In 1969, Sears captivated millions with their iconic "Wish Book," the first hint that shopping could be delightful and immersive. QVC took that magic live, turning TV into a real-time treasure hunt. Then Amazon brought the world's shelves online, making spontaneous discovery just a click away. But the latest wave of platforms reduced shopping to cheap gimmicks and disposable goods.  The magic faded — until now.

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Today, we’re excited to introduce Turtles, the engine for interactive shopping. Emerging from stealth with $250M+ of GMV, Turtles is built for a new era: one where the line between shopping and entertainment disappears. Our infrastructure powers everything from

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Today, we’re launching new speech-to-text and text-to-speech audio models in the API—making it possible to build more powerful, customizable, and intelligent voice agents that offer real value. Our latest speech-to-text models set a new state-of-the-art benchmark, outperforming existing solutions in accuracy and reliability—especially in challenging scenarios involving accents, noisy environments, and varying speech speeds. These improvements increase transcription reliability, making the models especially well-suited for use cases like customer call centers, meeting note transcription, and more.

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The Problem

For the first time, developers can also instruct the text-to-speech model to speak in a specific way—for example, “talk like a sympathetic customer service agent”—unlocking a new level of customization for voice agents. This enables a wide range of tailored applications, from more empathetic and dynamic customer service voices to expressive narration for creative storytelling experiences.

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We launched our first audio model in 2022⁠ and since then, we’ve committed to improving the intelligence, accuracy, and reliability of these models. With these new audio models, developers can build more accurate and robust speech-to-text systems and expressive, characterful text-to-speech voices—all within the API.

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The 3 pillars

1 - Shopping

For the first time, developers can also instruct the text-to-speech model to speak in a specific way—for e