TheChek News Flow

Meet Gladia, a French AI startup that wants to change how companies interact with audio data. The company develops an audio transcription application programming interface (API) that you can integrate with other products and is supposed to work much better than what’s available out there. And this tech foundation unlocks new use cases around audio.

If you’re familiar with audio transcription APIs, you know that big cloud providers already have their own APIs.

There’s Google’s speech-to-text API, Amazon Transcribe, Microsoft’s Speech to Text, etc. They work well, but they are expensive, slow and don’t have a ton of features.

Gladia’s co-founder and CEO Jean-Louis Quéguiner, who was the former head of AI for OVHcloud and co-founded the company with Jonathan Soto, told me about some of the limitations with existing APIs. According to him, there are three pain points with existing products. First, when it comes to prices, transcribing an hour of audio generally costs $1.50 to $2 an hour.

Second, the output isn’t always very reliable as some languages work well while others are barely supported. When it comes to advanced features, if people speak in multiple languages, chances are the API simply won’t be able to notice the language change and transcribe the audio in more than one language.

Third, transcription APIs are slow.

It can take more than 15 minutes to transcribe an hour of audio.

That’s fine if you don’t need transcriptions right away, but it means that you won’t be able to use these APIs in some industries.

Whisper’s whisperer

Gladia is based on Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source transcription model. “We started from Whisper. We haven’t reinvented the wheel, but we listened to our customers and they told us: ‘What I want is something that works as well as Whisper,’” Jean-Louis Quéguiner told me.

But Whisper isn’t perfect. The vanilla version is still quite slow, so Gladia has spent a lot of time turning Whisper into a fast and responsive transcription model. That’s not the only issue.

WhatsApp has introduced a new feature to automatically silence calls from unknown numbers.

This comes after multiple customers in India, the chat app’s biggest market with more than 500 million users, have complained about an increase in spam calls in the last few months.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced the call silencing feature along with a new privacy checkup option.

“You can now automatically silence incoming calls from unknown contacts on WhatsApp for even more privacy and control,” he said.

Users will be able to turn on this option by going to Settings > Privacy > Calls and selecting the “Silence unknown caller” option.

WhatsApp said that while calls from unknown numbers will be automatically silenced they will show up in notifications and the app’s call list.

This is in case you want to check later if it was from someone you know but don’t have their number saved in contacts.

When you will get a call from unknown number, the phone will just show you the number along with the message “silenced unknown number.”

Separately, WhatsApp has added a new privacy checkup feature that will appear in the Privacy section.

The checkup will take you through multiple steps to make you aware of different privacy controls like “Choose who can contact you,” “Control your personal info,” “Add more privacy to your chats,” and “Add more protection to your account.” Users can change settings like two-factor authentication, decide who can add them to groups, set a default timer for disappearing messages, and control who can see their profile picture through this process.

Last month, WhatsApp rolled out back-end updates to reduce spam calls to customers in India. The company said it ramped up its machine learning-based detection capacity and expected these calls to reduce by 50%.

ElevenLabs, the viral AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, has raised a new round of cash.

Today, the startup announced the closure of a $19 million Series A round co-led by entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross alongside Andreessen Horowitz. Other participants included heavyweights Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly.

A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the tranche values ElevenLabs at $99 million post-money — a respectable figure, especially considering that the startup launched just over a year ago.

“This investment will be used to continue building ElevenLab’s cutting-edge research hub for voice AI and to launch a range of additional products to support specific market verticals such as publishing, gaming, entertainment and conversational applications,” co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch via email.

ElevenLabs, which has made headlines over the past few months for reasons both good and abhorrent, was founded by Staniszewski, who previously worked at Palantir, and his childhood friend Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google employee. Inspired by the mediocre dubbing of American movies they watched growing up in Poland, their native country, the pair set about designing a platform that could do better — leveraging AI, of course.

ElevenLabs can turn text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices or entirely novel “artificial” voices that mimic the sounds of people of various genders, ages and ethnicities. The company’s AI text-to-speech models are language-agnostic, allowing corporate customers to fine-tune them and build their own, proprietary speech models on top.

Coinciding with the Series A raise, 15-employee ElevenLabs is launching Projects, a workflow for editing and creating long-form spoken content. With Projects, users can generate dialogue segments and even audiobooks without having to leave the platform.

“For business-to-business partners, our technology can be used in areas such as scalable and multilingual audiobook creation, voicing characters in video games, voicing digital articles, supporting the visually impaired to access online written content and powering AI radio,” Staniszewski said.

ElevenLabs, which launched in beta in late January, picked up steam rather quickly — owing to the extremely high quality of its generated voices, speedy generation times and generous free tier. But as alluded to earlier, the publicity hasn’t always been positive — particularly once bad actors began to exploit the platform for their own ends.

4chan, the infamous message board known for its conspiratorial content, used ElevenLabs’ tool to share hateful messages mimicking celebrities like the actor Emma Watson.

Elsewhere, The.Verge’s James Vincent was able to tap ElevenLabs to clone targets’ voices in a matter of seconds — generating audio samples containing everything from threats of violence to expressions of racism and transphobia.

In response, ElevenLabs said that it would introduce a set of new safeguards, like limiting voice cloning to paid accounts, banning users who repeatedly violate its terms of service and providing a new AI detection tool.

The detection tool launches today. Called AI Speech Classifier and available as an API to “selected” partners, it’s designed to detect whether an uploaded audio sample contains AI-generated content from ElevenLabs.

“Ensuring Generative AI platforms can be embraced safely is a key challenge for the whole AI-generated sector, including text, image and voice platforms,” Staniszewski said. “We must ensure that people are educated about the nature of the generative media landscape and know that such content is out there — we are committed to building tools to help people detect AI-generated content, in the interest of transparency.”

A voluntary detection tool — assuming it even works as advertised — won’t necessarily deter bad behavior. But there’s another elephant in the room that ElevenLabs hasn’t addressed: the existential threat its tech poses to voice actors.

Motherboard writes about how voice actors are increasingly being asked to sign rights to their voices away so that clients can use AI to generate synthetic versions that could eventually replace them — sometimes without additional compensation. Internal emails seen by The New York Times, meanwile, indicate that Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, is working on tools for AI-assisted “voice cloning.”

It would appear that ElevenLabs sees this as the natural progression of things, touting its work with publishers like Storytel and media platforms like TheSoul Publishing and MNTN for audiobooks, video games and radio content. (Storytel and TheSoul Publishing are strategic investors.) The company claims that it has over a million registered users across the creative, entertainment and publishing spaces who’ve created ten years’ worth of audio content.

ElevenLabs plans to eventually extend its AI models to voice dubbing, following in the footsteps of startups like Papercup and Deepdub and building what it calls “a foundation to be able to transfer emotions and intonation from one language to another.”

“This will enable any video to be dubbed into any language in an engaging, effective, and scalable way, all while maintaining the original speaker’s voice,” ElevenLabs writes in a press release. “[We are] already conducting a number of tests with industry partners to enable AI dubbing at scale.”

With $21 million in the bank ($2 million of which came from a pre-seed round in January), ElevenLabs — consequences be damned — is laser-focused on beating back its rivals in the burgeoning generative voice space. They include incumbents like Amazon, Google and Microsoft as well as startups like Murf, Tavus, Resemble AI, Respeecher, Play.ht and Lovo.

I'm at the bustling Cannes Lions advertising festival in the south of France, where the sun is strong and the rosé is flowing. The mood feels buoyant, even as the advertising world has pulled back on spending and tech companies reel from bruising mass layoffs.

Some attendees are sharing Airbnbs with colleagues or staying far from the venue to cut down on costs. But tech companies still have a big presence: Spotify, Pinterest and Meta Platforms were among the companies that took over the famous Croisette Beach, featuring lounges with plenty of branding for social media posts and space for scenic meetings.

TikTok wasn’t on the beach, but it set up shop close by at the swanky, five-star Carlton hotel. It offered booths for filming TikTok videos, while tips emblazoned on large cutouts encouraged attendees to use sounds and incorporate trends and editing tools, such as those offered by CapCut, an app owned by TikTok’s parent ByteDance. It also brought a slew of executives.

Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, noted it’s been a “challenging” 12 months for the advertising industry, citing the macroeconomic environment. “Everybody has felt it,” he said at a press briefing Monday.

“There’s a real focus on how do we make our marketing budgets work harder. How do we do more with less as an organization and as an industry?” He doesn’t see that changing in the near term.

TikTok’s advertising sales still pale beside internet giants like Meta.

But the short-form video app’s presence at Cannes, and what its executives say, are notable because the app’s rise in popularity has set off a seismic shift among social media apps and how people consume content.

Even for TikTok, audience growth is a problem.

For the last year, TikTok and ByteDance have been wrestling with how to revive U.S. growth on the app, as The Information reported earlier this year. One way is to attract older users.

Kate Jhaveri, TikTok’s global head of marketing, said the app sees an opportunity “for more people to be on TikTok.”

Neither Chandlee or Jhaveri addressed the biggest threat to U.S. growth, a potential U.S. ban.

Four years ago, Chandlee said, the handful of TikTok executives who attended Cannes were just trying to get meetings and explain why brands should care about the fledgling app. That’s no longer the case. On Monday, TikTok announced a partnership with Unilever, to create content around #CleanTok, a popular hashtag on the platform that highlights cleaning tips.

“We’ve very much shifted from why to how,” Chandlee said.

Catching Up with Emma Chamberlain

Emma Chamberlain, the 22-year-old megastar that started her career on YouTube six years ago, spoke on a panel with Spotify on Monday about building her brand. She signed an exclusive deal with Spotify for her podcast “Anything Goes,” which went into effect earlier this year. After the panel, I interviewed Chamberlain. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kaya Yurieff: You started as a YouTuber, but you’ve expanded in all these ways, including building your coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee. What do the future of creators’ careers look like?

Emma Chamberlain: It’s so impossible to predict, that you can’t even look around, in a way. You actually have to look inward. My one piece of advice is every individual does have something unique to offer. That’s why every individual can be a creator if they want. The problem is we can see something succeeding in the creator economy and say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna do that, so that I can succeed.’ And that’s exactly what you can’t do. You have to bring something new … Don’t underestimate your own unique voice. That is your only superpower in this industry.

KY: Podcasting has become super popular, but also super crowded. How do you stand out?

EC: I started podcasting when it wasn’t the hot thing, especially for young people. I started because I love talking. That’s one of the things I have to offer – being able to talk for a long time and not get tired. It’s always just been speaking from my own interests. Like, what am I truly interested in? Speaking from a place of organic emotion, that just resonates. People I think look at a podcast and they say, ‘I can just sit here and talk about whatever,’ and sort of just be all over the place and it's fine. That might work for some, but the best podcasts do have a level of thought that goes into it before. You can’t just turn on the microphone and start talking about whatever. Being tactful about what you’re talking about and being thoughtful, that’s what sets it apart.

KY: What’s on your wish list when it comes to podcasting features?

EC: What would be so incredible is some sort of explore page. A whole page where it’s just like all these different options. It could be episodes recommended for you. With other platforms, you’re constantly sort of being fed new things. Like [Spotify’s] Daily Mix playlist, but for podcast episodes.

KY: What are your future career goals?

EC: The podcast is so great because it’s such a blank canvas. It can become anything I want. That’s why I named the show “Anything Goes” so that I could literally do whatever I want at any given moment. The podcast is gonna be something that remains a part of my career for the foreseeable future.

With coffee or even just growing brands in general, that’s something that I’ve grown a new passion for. Who knows if there’s another brand. We have too many ideas.

KY: Do you want Chamberlain Coffee to be like Starbucks?

EC: No. I don’t have a coffee brand that exists now that’s like ‘I want to do that.’ That brand doesn’t exist. For me, it’s remaining a premium product that feels elevated and the quality is there. I think a lot of times when it goes too big, the quality just gets destroyed, right? And that’s something I don’t want to do. I think being premium, but also being incredibly accessible to whoever wants to experience that. So it’s like finding that balance where it’s widespread enough that anyone can get their hands on it if they want to, but preserving the quality is important to me.

What else is going on in Cannes…

Snap partnered with Disney to take over art gallery La Malmaison, which features various rooms themed to Disney movies, including the upcoming animated musical “Wish” and “Elemental,” released on Friday, which is set in a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together. Attendees scan QR codes to open the Snapchat app and see augmented reality effects overlay on the exhibit around them.

Economic growth has lagged this year on trade weakness and property sector woes

China has cut benchmark lending rates for the first time in almost a year as policymakers push ahead with cautious monetary support in an effort to spur more robust growth in the country’s struggling economy.

The one-year loan prime rate (LPR) was reduced by 10 basis points to 3.55 per cent, the People’s Bank of China said on Tuesday, while the five-year equivalent rate was lowered to 4.2 per cent from 4.3 per cent.

The rates, which are set by major banks and influence the cost of borrowing for businesses and households, indicate authorities’ latest effort to shift the policy framework towards easing as concern mounts over the trajectory of the world’s second-biggest economy.

China’s economy has failed to fully rebound six months after authorities unwound severe Covid-19 restrictions that had been in place for three years, with growth under pressure from trade headwinds and weakness in the property sector, which accounts for more than a quarter of activity.

Last week, the PBoC cut the country’s medium-term lending facility, which affects banking sector liquidity, while Beijing unveiled additional tax breaks for businesses. Economists widely anticipate additional supportive measures to be rolled out in the coming months.

China’s benchmark CSI 300 stock index was flat following the LPR announcement, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises index of Hong Kong-listed mainland companies dropped 1.9 per cent. Shares in property developers led losses after the five-year rate was cut by just 10 basis points.

“The market was expecting up to [0.15 percentage points] on the five-year LPR, since it’s linked to mortgages and would help to boost the property market,” said Marcella Chow, a global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management. “The important thing right now is to boost confidence, so a better macro outlook and stronger property prices are key.”

Economic data has disappointed in the months following China’s reopening, fuelling speculation over whether policymakers would remain cautious or pivot to more forceful stimulus measures to boost demand.

Over the weekend, analysts at Goldman Sachs cut their forecast for China’s full-year economic growth to 5.4 per cent from 6 per cent, citing “persistent growth headwinds and constrained policy responses”.

The government’s official growth target is 5 per cent, its lowest in decades, after the economy grew just 3 per cent last year.

Economists at Citi wrote in a report on the LPR cuts that “decisive support is necessary to avoid a confidence trap and keep growth on track”, adding that they “continue to see a measured stimulus package with a focus on property as both plausible and possible”.

Other economic indicators pointed to sustained pressures on confidence. The results of a June survey released on Tuesday by Bank of America showed consumer sentiment had weakened further, with only about a third of respondents saying they planned to spend more over the next six months, compared with more than 40 per cent in April.

The share of respondents expecting home prices to rise over the next year fell to just one in five, compared with one in three two months prior.

Bill Gates and other tech-industry investors are backing AI-powered startup KoBold Metals

Some of the tech industry’s most prominent investors are doubling down on one of Silicon Valley’s latest unicorns: a mining startup.

Berkeley, Calif.-based KoBold Metals, which explores for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt using artificial intelligence, is raising around $200 million in a fundraising round, said co-founder and Chief Executive Kurt House.

The capital injection values the company at more than $1 billion, he said. Part of that will be used to help it develop copper reserves it recently acquired in Zambia.

The fundraising round is backed by existing investors including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-tech venture-capital firm that invests money on behalf of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma.

Also involved in the round: venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and BOND, a venture-capital firm co-founded by Mary Meeker. A division of T. Rowe Price that manages client money led the round.

KoBold marries elements of two recently hot investment trends. Investors have been pouring money into projects that will help transition the world to a greener economy, including battery production for electric vehicles, clean hydrogen projects and carbon-removal technologies. That all requires a suite of metals that can be hard to find and expensive to dig out of the ground.

At the same time, recent advances in artificial intelligence, including the debut this year of AI-empowered chat apps, have funneled investment into AI startups.

Founded in 2018, KoBold says it uses data science and machine learning to identify deposits of cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium, crucial components of the electric-vehicle boom. It has 60 continuing exploration projects in North America, Africa and Australia. Last December, it agreed to invest $150 million to buy a controlling stake in a large, undeveloped copper deposit in Zambia that it says should take at least eight years to yield copper.

The company says it is trying to disrupt traditional methods of mining exploration, which haven’t changed much in decades. Big miners over the years have outsourced exploration to smaller companies. House said one goal is to collect more sophisticated and nuanced data about deposits that conventional methods wouldn’t traditionally collect.

“The success rates of finding new deposits have been declining,” House said. “It’s hard to see how in the current setup we’ll get sufficient discoveries in time without breakthroughs in technology.”

KoBold hadn’t planned on raising money so soon after its fundraising round last year, but stepped up plans in light of its copper project in Zambia. It also plans to use the fundraising proceeds for nickel and lithium exploration projects and software and hardware research and development, House said.

Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the company’s investors wanted to put in more capital because “we saw the algorithms are working and wanted [the company] to accelerate, and make sure they had plenty of resources.” She pointed to projects in Quebec that yielded more nickel sulfide than the industry average for that region.

The hunt for battery metals is intensifying as the world transitions away from fossil fuels and as most of the more-easily detectable deposits have already been snapped up. Large miners globally are trying to tap new areas farther underground. KoBold has exploration partnerships with miners Rio Tinto and BHP.

The investment, which is taking place amid a difficult backdrop for tech fundraising more broadly, is making bedfellows of tech players and more traditional industry backers. Other investors participating in the round include BHP, Norwegian energy company Equinor and Mitsubishi.

“The demand for metals needed for electrification and battery storage is only increasing,” said Jay Simons, a general partner at BOND. “Our demand is quickly outpacing the ability to meet it. To unlock the capacity that’s needed, you’ll need different approaches.”

Gulf state’s energy minister expects ‘several’ European countries to sign long-term agreements this year

Qatar is set to secure a second huge gas supply deal with a Chinese state-controlled company in less than a year, in a sign of the energy-hungry Asia power rushing to secure long-term agreements with one of the world’s top exporters of liquefied natural gas.

China National Petroleum Corporation and QatarEnergy are expected to sign a 27-year agreement on Tuesday, under which China will purchase 4mn tonnes of LNG a year from the Gulf state, said people briefed on the matter. CNPC will also take a 5 per cent equity in one of the LNG trains in Qatar’s expansion project in its North Field, the world’s biggest natural gas reservoir, as a joint venture partner.

The agreement comes just seven months after China’s Sinopec reached a similar 27-year deal with QatarEnergy, which at the time the Gulf state described as “the longest gas supply agreement in the history of the LNG industry”.

QatarEnergy declined to comment on the agreement.

The state-owned company has been courted by governments and energy companies across Europe and Asia as it pushes ahead with the $30bn expansion of its North Field, which will increase its domestic LNG production capacity from 77mn tonnes of LNG per annum to 110mn by 2025 and to 126mn tonnes two years later.

Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister, told the Financial Times that he expected to sign long-term supply agreements with “several European countries” before the end of the year.

He said QatarEnergy was close to sealing deals with the UK, France and Italy.

“We have been, and continuously are, in discussions with different companies to supply gas into the UK and we expect that before the end of the year, we could probably have a deal done,” said Kaabi, who is also chief executive of QatarEnergy. “We are going to have several European deals before the end of the year — for sure, 100 per cent.”

He said there were still some “commercial issues” to be finalised with the UK, which has been in talks with Qatar for about two years to lock in longer-term LNG supplies from the Gulf state.

QatarEnergy is the majority owner of South Hook LNG terminal in Wales, which has the capacity to supply a fifth of the UK’s gas needs. In 2020, it also secured rights for storage and redelivery capacity at the UK’s Grain LNG terminal in Kent for 25 years from 2025.

As one of the few energy producers that have been investing heavily in additional gas capacity in recent years, QatarEnergy has become a focal point for European countries desperate to wean themselves off Russian gas.

In May, European natural gas prices fell back to their normal trading range for the first time since the start of the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

But they rose sharply again in June, underscoring how the market remains on the edge over gas supplies, despite storage levels at record highs for the time of year.

While European governments courted Qatar in the early days of the energy crisis, they have proven slower to sign contracts, particularly the kind of very long-term deals Qatar is keen to secure for its own financial future. Germany is so far the only European country to sign a significant long-term agreement with Qatar since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with analysts pointing to concerns about balancing short-term energy security with commitments to reduce emissions.

The bulk of Qatar’s LNG is shipped to Asia, but Kaabi said he hoped it would be split more evenly between the east and west in the future to give the Gulf state diverse markets.

He added that he was happy that prices had come down from their highs in 2021, but warned that they could go back up if global economies picked up next year and there were normal winter temperatures.

“Whether the spike is as dramatic as what happened with Ukraine, I doubt because I think that’s a very unique situation. But I think we are going to see prices going higher,” said Kaabi.

Despite Europe’s gas storage sites being more than 70 per cent full, Kaabi warned there would still be a shortfall if economic growth rebounded.

“You don’t have much volume coming in to fill it even further,” he said. “Once you don’t replenish it for one summer, you get hit for two winters.”