East & Southeast Asia 🇯🇵 🇨🇳 🇻🇳 ➤ Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 leads Japanese and Vietnamese, while Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 ranks #1# in Mandarin. ➤ StepFun's StepAudio 2.5 TTS ranks #3# in Mandarin at 1,130 Elo, just 16 points behind Sonic 3.6. ➤ In Japanese, Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 ranks #2# at 1,123 Elo, ahead of ElevenLabs' v3 Conversational and Sonic 3.5. Japanese: Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 ranks #1# at 1,153 Elo, followed by Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 at 1,123 and ElevenLabs' v3 Conversational at 1,095. Sonic 3.5 and Eleven v3 round out the top 5 at 1,093 and 1,085. Mandarin: Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 ranks #1# at 1,185 Elo, followed by Sonic 3.6 at 1,146 and StepFun's StepAudio 2.5 TTS at 1,130. Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus and MiniMax's Speech 2.8 Turbo round out the top 5. Vietnamese: Sonic 3.6 ranks #1# at 1,721 Elo, followed by ElevenLabs' v3 Conversational at 1,677 and Eleven v3 at 1,676. Sonic 3.5 ranks #4# at 1,650, followed by Realtime TTS-2 at 1,600.

East Tennessee grows a little bit of everything. I enjoyed visiting Rainbow Roots Floral in Maryville to learn about the cut flower business and hear from local growers about the issues they’re facing.

East Asian food in the U.S. was honestly pretty disappointing. The Chinese and Japanese food I tried weren’t very good, and I haven’t tried Korean food here yet, so I can’t really say. But the Thai food was really good.