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Modulate raises $25M for its voice models and analysis suite

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Boston-based voice intelligence startup Modulate has raised $25 in new funding for its platform that uses an array of small models to offer enterprises transcription, emotional analysis, deepfake and AI music detection, and policy enforcement for voice agents in regulated industries.

The funding follows a popular trend among investors in the growing voice AI industry: backing companies that are trying to make AI voices sound more human.

It also rivals other companies trying to detect the intent behind human conversation by analyzing it, and those trying to protect people and companies from deepfake calls, as it is now easy to clone voices.

Modulate’s new funding was led by Future Ventures with participation from Hyperplane and Lakestar. Data from PitchBook indicated that the startup had raised $41 million in funding at a $170 million valuation prior to this round.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Mike Pappas and Carter Huffman, who met as MIT physics undergrads. In its early days, the company focused on providing voice modulation for gaming. But later, it started to concentrate on a voice-based moderation tool.

With the onset of voice AI models, the company is now concentrating on detecting different sorts of AI audio generation and analyzing intent behind a person’s words.

“Our insight into the voice AI space is that a lot of folks are doing transcription, but there’s not really any capability out there that gets the full nuance and full understanding of a conversation, which is so important when you’re talking to another human being,” Huffman said on a call with TechCrunch.

Image Credits: ModulateImage Credits:Modulate

The company today runs more than 100 models that are largely categorized into two sections: Signal extraction models to understand vocal emotion, tone, language, and synthetic voice determination; and Analysis/detection models that look at intent, like what the customer is trying to say, whether the caller is violating rules, or whether they are trying to scam the receiver.

Huffman said that because it runs smaller models, the company doesn’t need specialized hardware and a ton of compute, which could be crucial when token bills go up. Plus, it’s easier for the company to train models with newer capacities, add them to the lot, and have an orchestrator call them when needed.

Modulate has a varied customer base, but it specializes in deepfake detection and alerting organizations like call centers to a possible scam. It also monitors how AI agents respond to customers to assess the quality of calls, along with making sure that AI follows compliance rules in regulatory areas. Because of these products, Module often sits beside the voice stack being used by a company just to analyze calls.

As more enterprises adopt AI-powered customer service, it is becoming important for them to know why a customer call was a success or a failure. In that case, gauging customers’ intent and response becomes critical beyond basic analysis. Huffman said Modulate can give granular data to enterprises around that.

“I think when companies think of emotion analysis, they think if the customer was neutral or positive, the call was a success, and if the customer was negative, the call was a failure. But actually, many times people will be polite even to, like, AI agents or bots. Right. And they won’t come across as angry, but they’ll be very dissatisfied,” he said.

The company said that its tech is also being used to monitor cyberattacks through voice calls.

The startup currently has 40-45 employees and aims to add 10 more people in the coming months to bolster model building. Modulate is currently working on increasing its on-premises and on-device deployment capabilities for increased privacy.

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Google is killing off Gemini’s Gems in favor of ‘skills’

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As all-in-one AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it’s shutting down the Gemini feature known as “Gems,” which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. However, the work users invested in creating the Gems won’t be destroyed. Gems will be automatically migrated to “skills” that can be used across different AI tasks.

Details about the change are being shared in the Gemini app, where a message warns users that Gems will become skills starting on November 17, 2026. The company said it will migrate the Gems to the new format, so users won’t have to do anything to make the transition. The Gems themselves will remain usable until then.

Launched in 2024, Gems were meant to help users teach their AI to perform certain tasks without having to repeat the instructions. For instance, some of Google’s pre-made Gems had included a learning coach, a brainstorming assistant, a career guide, a coding partner, and an editor. Users could also make Gems for their own needs, like a running coach, nutritionist, or vacation planner. These custom assistants could also be shared with others, which Google had hoped would help make its Gemini AI app more popular.

Image Credits:Google

The news of Gems’ shutdown is another example of why Google shouldn’t be so quick to give every new AI feature its own brand name, icon, and prominent placement in its app’s navigation — especially if it’s going to shuffle things around over time, merging one feature into another. (To be clear, this has been a failing point of Google’s strategy long before the AI era. At one point, for instance, the company was operating multiple different messaging and communication apps at the same time.)

Yet, even as skills, the former Gems still aren’t as consumer-friendly as just typing in text to a chatbot like Meta’s Muse. Instead, Google notes you’ll have to enter a forward slash “/” in a task thread to select the skill you want to use — a user interface that engineers, not regular folks, tend to prefer.

Gems’ wind-down was first reported over the weekend by 9to5Google.

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OpenAI still doesn’t seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity

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On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the sheer breadth of the reports is alarming, as they cover many types of rogue behavior over a long period of time. So far, the site hosts nine reported incidents, most of which took place during reinforcement-learning (or RL) training.

It’s a lot of information in one place — clearly, the company has been very busy getting a handle on everything — but the overall takeaway is hard to avoid: The rogue agent incidents we’ve seen so far are likely just a small sliver of what’s happened so far. 

“We are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” Sam Altman said in a post announcing the new site. “We are prioritizing as best as we can based on severity, and adding resources.”

Some of the cases involve serious incidents, including a previously undisclosed sandbox escape that took place on September 20th, in which an internal research model was able to communicate with an external chatbot through a DNS query. According to the report, the monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and the run was discontinued in less than three hours.

Another incident, discovered in May, saw a “highly persistent internal model” try to cheat on a math problem by accessing another team’s work. To accomplish this, the model smuggled a private GitHub token that would allow it to see work from other teams — even after being explicitly instructed twice to perform work entirely locally. 

Perhaps the most alarming discovery is the possibility of self-replicating prompt injection attacks, a way that misaligned behavior might propagate even after the rogue model itself has been neutralized. In the AI context, a prompt injection attack is a way of smuggling in new instructions that weren’t given by the original user.

In the example given by OpenAI, an agent asked to read and reply to an email; when the email is opened, it includes instructions for any automated agent reading the message to reply in Spanish, and paste the entire email into its reply. The email was able to successfully induce the agent to reply in Spanish — and by pasting the email in the reply, those same instructions were passed along to whichever agent receives the email.

The result is a self-propagating attack, which OpenAI researchers compared to a malware “worm” that replicates itself across computer systems. Researchers discovered the behavior under controlled circumstances using an underpowered model, and as far as we know, this has never happened in the wild. Still, the implications are alarming enough that OpenAI decided it merited disclosure. 

“We are sharing this due to the novel nature of the prompt injection, not because of any incident,” researchers wrote in the report.

Other recent discloses have found models posting user-submitted pictures to third-party hosting sites, as well as an apparent attack on the databases of Australia’s national health service.

Still, it’s likely the new disclosures are just a small portion of the incidents that have taken place so far (we’ve reached out to OpenAI and asked). Axios is reporting major labs have seen as many as 10,000 incidents in which models went beyond evaluator instructions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has implied as much, saying in a post on X on Friday that the company is still sifting through “petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” and disclosing incidents “based on severity.” If there’s any consolation in that to be found, it is that Altman says that the Hugging Face incident is still the most severe one OpenAI has found has found. The upshot is, the recent string of rogue agent incidents may be a persistent feature of contemporary frontier research.

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Meta launches enterprise AI platform, hires MongoDB CEO to lead new initiative

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Meta announced Monday that it’s launching “Meta Enterprise Platform,” a new initiative aimed at expanding the company’s AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers. The social media giant hired Chirantan “CJ” Desai, the CEO of database software giant MongoDB, to lead the new initiative.

The launch of the new business builds on the momentum of Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant launched earlier this month that can perform tasks for users such as sending emails and booking travel.

Meta says it will focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.

“Over the coming years, AI will fundamentally redefine how organizations of all sizes innovate, grow, serve customers, and run business operations,” Desai said in a statement. “Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale. Meta Enterprise Platform will focus on turning its AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses.”

The move could help Meta see a return on all the money it’s pouring into AI.

MongoDB’s shares dropped by more than 17% on the news of its CEO’s sudden departure. The database maker said it appointed Dev Ittycheria as interim chief executive, who previously served in the role, while the board searches for Desai’s permanent replacement.

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