Voice AI startup Wispr reaches a $2 billion valuation after closing a $280 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures, fueled by four straight quarters of 150%-plus revenue growth and millions of users flocking to its flagship dictation app, Wispr Flow.
A new open-source benchmarking tool, Talkify Latency Bench, exposes dramatic speed differences between macOS speech-to-text engines, with Talkify leading at just 123ms and MacWhisper lagging nearly 10x slower at 1149ms across 20 measured trials.
MiniMax Music 3.0 launches as a powerful open-weights AI model that generates complete, fully arranged songs up to five minutes long from a single text prompt, giving creators unprecedented control over instrumentation, vocals, and song structure with no music production expertise required.
A powerful new open-source inference engine called h3.c now enables native AI video generation on Apple Silicon Macs, slashing render times nearly in half using Metal GPU acceleration and cutting memory usage from 36.5 GiB to just 2 GiB.
QwenLM launches Qwen-MM-Plugins, an open-source plugin system that gives any AI agent powerful multimodal capabilities — including image, video, audio, and document understanding — with modular tools supporting 3D modeling, web search, video editing, and more, compatible with Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI.
Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) launch as a powerful new class of multimodal AI supporting text, vision, and audio, optimized for fast on-device and edge deployment across major inference runtimes with flexible formats including GGUF, MLX, and ONNX.
OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a revolutionary full-duplex voice system that lets AI listen and speak simultaneously, delivering near-instant, natural conversation by eliminating traditional turn detection and cutting session startup from six network round trips to just one.
MiniMax H3 launches as a groundbreaking unified multimodal AI model that generates text, images, video, and audio in a single system, producing 2K resolution videos at less than a third of competitor prices, with open-source model weights coming soon.
A German court rules that AI music giant Suno illegally trained its models on copyrighted music without licenses, ordering the company—which generates 7 million songs daily—to disclose revenues and pay damages in a landmark case with sweeping global implications for the AI music industry.
Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann launches a $249 AI companion pendant 2.0 with a built-in speaker, OpenAI-powered upgrades, and randomly assigned voices, targeting lonely users as he pushes to scale sales from 5,000 to 50,000 units despite widespread public criticism.