Company business, funding and M&A, people, partnerships, lawsuits, regulation and policy, markets and infrastructure.
We’re proud to share that Meta Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026! Meta Omnilingual ASR is a suite of models providing ASR capabilities for over 1,600 languages, including 500 low-coverage languages never before https://t.co/V4Wwcr8wVF
Former Plaud executive Peter Mo’s startup Ambi has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures and Huaqin. It is releasing apps for iPhones, Macs and Apple Watch that can capture conversations throughout the day, with an AI agent intended to offer suggestions and begin tasks during meetings. Mo says ambient capture is off by default, but users remain responsible for informing others; Ambi says it stores no recordings and encrypts data without specifying the encryption method.
Napster co-founder Sean Parker is rebuilding Stability AI as an AI tools company for music professionals. Two years ago he participated in an $80 million rescue financing for the image-generation startup; he has now announced its new direction with CEO Prem Akkaraju.
AI voice company ElevenLabs said employees can sell some vested shares at a $22 billion valuation, double its $11 billion valuation at a financing round in February. The $300 million tender offer was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. It is the company's second employee share sale, following a $100 million offer at a $6.6 billion valuation in September 2025.
At Connect 2026, Meta put the Muse personal agent at the center of its hardware-plus-agent strategy, announcing voice and real-time video capabilities and several glasses devices, while previewing—but not releasing—a new frontier model.
Today we announced a strategic partnership with @HUMAIN spanning AI infrastructure, advanced model development, and deployment of AI solutions in Saudi Arabia and the broader region. We will jointly develop localized frontier AI models, initially focused on cybersecurity, voice, and strong performance in Arabic-language markets. https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-x-humain/
Fixed (thanks, @vthallam) — any other feedback on voice and/or transcriptions? @vthallam says the fix is in for transcripts disappearing when a call comes in during ChatGPT dictation, and that it should roll out in one of the upcoming weekly releases. Turley says it’s fixed and asks for more feedback.
