# Cartesia — Introducing Ink-2: The #1-ranked STT built for voice agents

- Company: Cartesia (cartesia.ai)
- Announced: 2026-07-09
- Category: new-model
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/ink-2
- Record: https://forck.live/items/8009-introducing-ink-2-the-1-ranked-stt-built-for-voice-agents
- Subject: Sonic / Ink
- Models affected: Ink-2

Cartesia released Ink-2, a speech-to-text model for voice agents that is ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis's streaming leaderboard for lowest word error rate. The model features built-in semantic turn detection and low latency with a time-to-final-transcript of 0.1 seconds. Ink-2 is available via API and on platforms including LiveKit, Vapi, and Pipecat.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/ink-2:

> We’re excited to release Ink-2: a speech-to-text model built for real-time voice agents.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/8009-introducing-ink-2-the-1-ranked-stt-built-for-voice-agents
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