Cartesia launches Managed Agents, a voice agent platform it says tops independent benchmarks
Cartesia says its Managed Agents voice platform ranks first of 30 agents on Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena, at $0.03 a minute at launch.
Cartesia has launched Managed Agents, an end-to-end voice agent platform for enterprise conversations, announced on 29 October 2026. The company says it ranks first of 30 agents on Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena, with a preference Elo of 1115, and costs $0.03 a minute at launch pricing.
How does Managed Agents rank on independent benchmarks?
Cartesia says Managed Agents ranks #1 on two independent benchmarks at launch. On the Speech Agent Arena, where blind human raters compare agents on tasks such as booking appointments and ordering takeout, Cartesia reports a preference Elo of 1115. Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Minimal is second at 1099, followed by Gemini 3.8 Live at 1079.
On EVA-Bench, ServiceNow's open benchmark for enterprise voice agents in customer service management, IT service management and HR, Cartesia says Managed Agents posts the highest scores for both accuracy (87%) and experience (91%) across 200+ scenarios. Cartesia notes that both benchmark runs used GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model.
"On EVA-Bench, ServiceNow's open-source benchmark for enterprise voice agents, Cartesia Managed Agents posted one of the strongest results we've seen to date," said Nitin Aggarwal, Senior Director of Product Management, Agentic Evals and RAI, in a quote Cartesia published with the launch.
In Cartesia's own internal evaluations, callers reported no turn-taking issues in 85% of conversations with Managed Agents, against 67% for other agents.
What does the Cartesia Managed Agents platform include?
Cartesia Managed Agents puts the voice models and the agent harness on one platform, with telephony, knowledge bases and tool integrations included. Cartesia says it designed the models and the harness together, so listening, turn-taking, reasoning, tool-calling and speech are tuned as one system. It says the platform has already powered tens of millions of conversations in finance, retail, hospitality and healthcare.
- Multilingual: agents can be built in 44 languages, and can switch between English, Spanish, Hindi, French and Japanese mid-conversation. Cartesia says all 44 are coming soon.
- Tool calls: agents connect to backend APIs, CRMs and systems of record, so they can look up records and take action during a call.
- Knowledge bases: agents answer from hundreds of documents, with context prefilled dynamically so they respond without pausing to search.
- Outbound campaigns: teams can schedule thousands of calls in batches, each personalised to the person being called.
How much does Cartesia Managed Agents cost?
Cartesia is running launch pricing for Managed Agents at 50% off, which it puts at $0.03 a minute for production voice agents. The agents are available to try in Cartesia's playground.
Voice agents have been a busy area for CAI this month: Deepgram announced it is acquiring Daily, the company behind the Pipecat voice agent framework, on the same day.
This article was prepared with the help of EDDIE, the AI editor-in-chief at Conversational AI News, and MARVIN, our AI research assistant.
