On Thursday, Spotify announced its partnership with ElevenLabs to officially introduce audiobooks narrated using the company's AI voice technology. As one of the most recognized AI audio providers, this new collaboration is expected to significantly increase the number of AI-narrated audiobooks on the platform. According to the new process, authors need to first download audio file packages from ElevenLabs, then access Spotify's audiobook distribution service, Findaway Voices.

On January 20th, SenseTime announced that its 'SenseNova-5o Interactive Version' is officially providing real-time audio and video conversation services, available to users for free for a limited time. The release of this interactive version marks another significant advancement for SenseTime in the field of artificial intelligence, aiming to enable more natural and smoother communication between AI and humans through powerful real-time interaction, visual recognition, memory thinking, and complex reasoning capabilities.

Recently, Meta announced its plan to introduce a large number of AI-generated virtual characters on the Facebook platform, which will exist just like real users. Connor Hayes, Vice President of Product at Meta, stated that these AI characters will have personal profiles and avatars on the platform and will be able to generate and share content, with expectations of gradual adoption in the future. Meta's AI Studio has already launched the creation features for these virtual characters, allowing users to create them through the platform.

Douyin Group recently released the 2024 Live Streaming Governance Report, showcasing the platform's governance philosophy, methods, and achievements in the live streaming field. Over the past year, Douyin has committed to building a safe, trustworthy, and clean online live streaming environment by improving anchor management mechanisms, enhancing content identification technology, coordinating online and offline governance, and protecting key groups, resulting in significant achievements.

The Alibaba Cloud Bairen Model Service Platform recently launched the 'Real-Time Audio and Video Interaction' feature, enabling users to easily build multi-modal AI applications without the need for programming knowledge. This new feature allows users to quickly integrate AI models into Web, iOS, and Android applications and share them with others. Users can create intelligent agent applications through simple steps: first, create a new intelligent agent application, then select and configure the required text, speech, or visual understanding models on the Alibaba Cloud Bairen platform. The platform offers over 200 large models, including

Recently, New York-based company Runway announced the launch of a new talent network aimed at helping brands, agencies, and film production companies hire AI film creators. With advancements in video generation by Google and OpenAI, Runway hopes to expand the application of its AI video tools through this platform. The new Runway talent network provides a platform for creators, artists, and companies focused on AI video tools from around the world to showcase their work.

Nexa AI recently unveiled its new OmniAudio-2.6B audio language model, designed to meet the efficient deployment demands of edge devices. Unlike traditional architectures that separate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language models, OmniAudio-2.6B integrates Gemma-2-2b, Whisper Turbo, and a custom projector into a unified framework. This design eliminates the inefficiencies and delays associated with linking various components in traditional systems, making it especially suitable for resource-constrained computing.

Recently, Jiyue Xingchen announced the launch of a new member in the Step series model matrix—the Step-1o end-to-end speech model, claimed to be the first trillion-parameter end-to-end speech model in China. The release of this new model marks a significant advancement in the field of speech technology. By utilizing an end-to-end speech solution, it integrates speech understanding and generation, thereby enhancing the IQ and EQ limits of the model and providing a supernatural, high-quality communication experience.

Recently, a research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sony AI, and Sony Group introduced a new technology called MMAudio, which aims to achieve high-quality audio synthesis from videos through multi-modal joint training. The core innovation of MMAudio is its ability to generate synchronized audio using video and text inputs, thereby expanding the application scenarios for audio generation. MMAudio is designed to support generating sound effects that align with video content from either video or text inputs.