> For clean Markdown of any page, append .md to the page URL.
> For a complete documentation index, see https://docs.vapi.ai/llms.txt.
> For AI client integration (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), connect to the MCP server at https://docs.vapi.ai/_mcp/server.

# What's New: October 2025 – March 2026

Here's a summary of major items shipped from October 2025 through March 2026.

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## Platform

1. **Squads v2**: Visual builder to simplify sophisticated multi-assistant orchestration with seamless handoffs between specialized agents.

2. **Composer (Alpha)**: Intelligent assistant inside the dashboard that allows you to describe what you need through plain text prompts to help build, adjust, and debug voice agents.

3. **Simulations (Alpha)**: Voice agent testing feature to build confidence through enabling systematic, AI-powered testing in specific scenarios with evaluation of outcomes.

4. **Monitoring & Issues**: Automated call quality monitoring with trigger-based issue detection, alerting, and resolution suggestions.

5. **HIPAA with Data Retention**: New compliance mode with private storage and in-dashboard toggle/purchase flow — available for additional cost.

6. **Zero Data Retention**: Compliance mode that keeps context data during call as needed to execute tasks and retains no data afterwards.

7. **Consolidated Logs**: Unified log viewing into a single page.

8. **Vapi Voices**: 12 new ultra-realistic voices released, optimized for latency and cost with adjustable speed controls exposed. 8 legacy voices deprecated.

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## New Models & Provider Support

### Transcriber Models (Speech-to-Text)

1. **Deepgram Nova-3 Languages**: Added Hebrew, Urdu, Tagalog, and Arabic bilingual support.

2. **Cartesia Transcriber**: ink-whisper.

3. **Soniox**: stt-rt-v4.

### Intelligence Models (LLM)

1. **GPT-5 Family**: OpenAI's latest intelligence models, including GPT-5, 5-Mini, 5-Nano, 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, 5.4-Mini, 5.4-Nano.

2. **Claude 4.5–4.6**: Anthropic's latest intelligence models Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6.

3. **Gemini 3 Flash**: Google's latest intelligence models.

4. **Grok 4 Fast**: Reasoning and non-reasoning variants.

5. **GPT Realtime Mini**: OpenAI's lightweight realtime model.

### Voice Models (Text-to-Speech)

1. **Cartesia**: sonic-3, sonic-3-2026-01-12, sonic-3-2025-10-27.

2. **WellSaid**: Caruso (new), legacy.

3. **Inworld**: inworld-tts-1 (REST, original), inworld-tts-1.5-max (WebSocket, \$10/M chars), inworld-tts-1.5-mini (WebSocket, \$5/M chars).

4. **ElevenLabs Scribe v2**: Latest version of ElevenLabs speech-to-text.

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## Developer Tools & API

1. **Structured Outputs Improvements**: Updates to our AI-powered analysis and data extraction tool, including transient structured outputs, audio-based extraction, and regex extraction.

2. **SIP Request Tool + DTMF over SIP INFO**: Send SIP requests and DTMF tones via SIP INFO messages during calls.

3. **Variable Passing Between Tool Calls**: Pass output variables from one tool call as input to subsequent tool calls.

4. **Encrypted Tool Arguments**: Encrypt sensitive tool arguments to protect data in transit.

5. **Low Confidence Speech Hook**: Hook that triggers when the transcriber returns low-confidence speech results.

6. **Time Elapsed Hook**: Hook that triggers at specified time intervals during a call.

7. **assistant.speechStarted Event**: New event fired when the assistant begins speaking.

8. **MCP Improvements**: Bearer auth, \$ref dereferencing, child tool messages/discovery.

9. **Warm Transfer Improvements**: SIP support, caller ID, context engineering, variable filling.