Talk to AI

Hi! Welcome back. I hope your Monday is going as well as mine. In today’s digest, I’m discussing a new AI model that wants to shake up the voice scene. But first…

The headlines: 

🎵 Sorry, US-based Spotify users, but the price is increasing again. 

🍎 Remember the “I’m a Mac guy?” Well, he’s made the switch to Windows.

🕹️ Nvidia is releasing gaming laptops, which include Microsoft’s AI Copilot.

Voice technology has lagged for the last decade. We started envisioning a futuristic universe when we got voice assistants like Siri, but haven’t got much further than speakers that can turn on a light. One company called Cartesia wants to take it that bit further with AI. 

Cartesia Sonic is an AI voice model – a state space model (SSM) that the founders invented while working as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab. The team (which also boasts backgrounds from Google Brain and Snorkel AI) has spent years building the theory behind SSMs, now being used in academia and industry for vision, robotics, and biology. 

The SSM architecture enables Sonic to quickly process vast amounts of data, providing seamless and natural voice interactions. With Sonic, you can generate high-quality, lifelike speech with minimal latency. The AI boasts a response time of just 135ms, making it ideal for applications requiring real-time feedback, such as customer support, entertainment, and content creation.

One of the standout features is Sonic’s ability to customize voices on the fly. Users can adjust parameters like speed and emotion and instantly clone voices for different needs.

Sonic also excels in speech generation, achieving a 2x lower word error rate and a 1-point higher quality score than traditional models. This ensures that Sonic generates speech effectively and understands it accurately.

Cartesia's larger agenda is to expand well beyond voice — aiming for its models to instantly understand and generate content in any modality across any device. 

If you want to try out Sonic now, you can dive into the web playground, or if you’re a dev, you can reach out to the team to partner on building a real-time, conversational AI platform. 

OUR PICKS

Atlas is a collaborative, web-based map-creation platform for visualizing anywhere on Earth.

Does It Exist is like a search engine but for finding out if your idea already exists. 

Base lets you log your gym workout with your voice. 

MAKER’S CORNER

Figgy gives designers Github-style contribution graphs for all their Figma designs,

Supalogs is a platform to view and manage user feedback and your changelog.

Bolty turns videos into short-form content in a single click. 

LEADERBOARD LIFTOFF 

Ginix, a platform for finding, analyzing, and monitoring reviews of your product, clinched the top spot over the weekend. 🚀

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