Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model for generating sounds and songs that it claims was trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings.
Called Stable Audio Open, the generative model takes a text description (e.g.
Stability AI says that it’s not optimized for this, and suggests that users looking for those capabilities opt for the company’s premium Stable Audio service.
Stable Audio Open also can’t be used commercially; its terms of service prohibit it.
And it doesn’t perform equally well across musical styles and cultures or with descriptions in languages other than English — biases Stability AI blames on the training data.
Currently invite-only, Airchat is already ranked #27 in social networking on Apple’s App Store.
The difference is that the posts and replies are audio recordings, which the app then transcribes.
When you open Airchat, messages automatically start playing, and you quickly cycle through them by swiping up and down.
After joining Airchat this morning, most of the posts I saw were about the app itself, with Ravikant and Norgard answering questions and soliciting feedback.
“Humans are all meant to get along with other humans, it just requires the natural voice,” Ravikant said.
India’s largest audio and wearables brand BoAt is investigating a possible data breach after hackers advertised a cache of alleged customer data online.
A sample of alleged customer data was uploaded on a known cybercrime forum, which includes full names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses and order numbers.
In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, BoAt said it was investigating the matter but did not disclose specifics.
At BoAt, safeguarding customer data is our top priority,” the company said.
The brand, however, postponed its public listing plans later, after seeing a slowdown in the public market.
Spotify’s live audio app is no longer active, but the company has been using the tech to connect fans and artists better with the “Listening Party” feature.
A Listening Party is listed under the events section of an artist’s profile.
Spotify said that while typically top fans of a band receive a specific invitation, any Spotify Premium user can join the Listening Party through the listing.
Plus, each listening party has a live chat room during the event.
Now it is trying to bring parts of group listening and live audio interactions together with the Listening Party feature.
Hardware maker Rabbit has tapped a partnership with ElevenLabs to power voice commands on its devices.
The Rabbit r1 will ship with ElevenLabs’ tech, which will enable voice commands from the users and how the pocket AI device talks back to them.
ElevenLabs said that while r1 was poised for voice interaction from the start, the company’s low latency models will make interactions more human-like.
Our collaboration is about making the r1 a truly dynamic co-pilot, ” ElevenLabs’ CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a prepared statement.
In January, Rabbit said that it will use Perplexity AI’s solutions to answer users’ questions on the device.
AI-coustics to fight noisy audio with generative AINoisy recordings of interviews and speeches are the bane of audio engineers’ existence.
According to co-founder and CEO Fabian Seipel, AI-coustics’ technology goes beyond standard noise suppression to work across — and with — any device and speaker.
“We’ve been driven by a personal mission to overcome the pervasive challenge of poor audio quality in digital communications,” Seipel said.
But Seipel says AI-coustics has a unique approach to developing the AI mechanisms that do the actual noise reduction work.
“Speech quality and intelligibility still is an annoying problem in nearly every consumer or pro-device as well as in content production or consumption.
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group.
Pocket FM offers audio series with several short episodes and aim to become the “Netflix for audio” globally.
That means you can’t use the coins you bought on Pocket FM to unlock content Pocket Novel products and vice versa.
Pocket FM also has a limited audiobook vertical where it competes with the likes of Audible with a similar pay-to-unlock strategy.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA has held talks with Pocket FM for a potential mega funding round, TechCrunch reported last week.
Apple will pay artists more to have a spatial audio version on Apple MusicApple will pay additional royalties starting this month to artists if they have a spatial audio version on Apple Music, according to multiple reports.
The company will pay up to 10% additional royalty if an artist has all their songs in spatial audio, per a report by 9to5Mac.
The extra money doesn’t depend on users playing the spatial audio version, though.
In December, Bloomberg reported that Apple was planning to introduce incentives for artists to add songs to Apple Music that are mixed on Dolby Atmos technology.
Apple Music rivals including Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, and Deezer offer spatial offers.
Elon Musk’s own social network X is rolling out the ability to make audio and video calls directly from the app to its Android client.
One of the X engineers working on the project posted about the feature release and said it will be available to Android users after an app update.
audio and video calls on X slowly rolling out for android users today!
It’s one of the long list of things only paid users can do on X.
Users can enable or disable calling through Settingle > Privacy and safety > Direct Messages > Enable audio and video calling.
Nwm (short for New Wave Maker and pronounced “noom,” a representative told me) makes headphones that use a similar technique to noise canceling, but kind of turned inside-out.
Instead of canceling out noise coming into your ear, the headphones cancel any noise they make that isn’t going towards you.
That’s usually not a problem with earbuds or closed-back headphones, which physically contain the sound they produce.
But nwm’s whole thing is that their headphones are more like a pair of small speakers right by your ears.
The chair is pretty normal looking for a gamer-type one, and you wouldn’t know it had speakers hidden in it.
