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June 9, 2025Monday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal 1.0 Released: More Stable Python SDK with Explicit Configuration

    Modal has launched version 1.0 of its Python SDK client, a milestone the company says brings a new level of maturity and stability to its serverless cloud compute platform, with far fewer breaking changes expected going forward. The release removes "magic" behaviors such as automatic mounting of local packages, splits core functionality across separate decorators like the new @modal.concurrent, and consolidates local file handling under the modal.Image class. Modal also plans SDKs for other languages and is exploring how the platform should serve AI-driven agent workflows.

June 5, 2025Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    GPT-4.1 vs Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Which AI Delivers Better Voice Agents?

    Vapi compares GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet as the LLM behind voice agents, weighing conversation quality, context handling, reasoning transparency, platform integration and cost. GPT-4.1 offers a 1,000,000-token context window and 32,768-token outputs with 75% caching discounts, while Claude 3.7 provides a 200,000-token context and 128,000-token outputs. Both models are selectable on Vapi's voice agent platform.

June 4, 2025Wednesday
  2. Vapi Blog22

    Three Examples of Voice AI Improving Logistics

    Vapi outlines three voice AI use cases in logistics: ShipEX uses voice intelligence across 350 trucks to route maintenance alerts and accident reports, the Idaho State Liquor Division's voice picking system lifted pick rates 35%, and maintenance technicians log issues by voice to auto-create CMMS work orders. The article also details API integration with TMS, CRM, and WMS systems and deployment considerations.

  3. Vapi Blog22

    11 Great ElevenLabs Alternatives: Vapi-Native TTS Models

    Vapi now offers 11 built-in text-to-speech models as alternatives to ElevenLabs, including Neuphonic's Neu-hq and Neu-fast, Cartesia's Sonic lineup, Azure TTS, OpenAI TTS, Deepgram, Smallest AI's Lightning, LMNT, PlayHT, Hume's Octave and Rime AI's Mist v2. Developers can switch between them in minutes without re-coding, and Vapi says it handles over a million voice calls per day across these models.

May 30, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog42

    Modal adds Nvidia B200 and H200 GPUs at $6.25 and $4.54 per hour

    Modal now offers Nvidia B200 and H200 GPUs to any account holder with no sales contact or quota request, priced at $6.25/hour and $4.54/hour respectively. The B200 carries 180 GB of HBM3e memory and 8 TB/s bandwidth, and in Modal's vLLM test running DeepSeek V3 in 8-bit precision, 8xB200 cut median time-to-first-token 2.5x versus 8xH200 at 1 request per second.

  2. Vapi Blog15

    Best Speechify Alternatives: 5 TTS Tools Compared

    A comparison of five Speechify alternatives picks NaturalReader for cross-device use and app integrations at $119 per year, Voice Dream Reader for iPhone voice control at a $14.99 one-time price, and Murf AI for professional voices from about $19 per month. ReadSpeaker focuses on reading web pages across 45 languages from $4.90 per month, while Balabolka is a free Windows-only option.

May 29, 2025Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog25

    Choosing Between Gemini Models for Voice AI

    Vapi outlines how to pick among four Gemini models for voice agents: Gemini 1.0 Pro for predictable, compliance-friendly flows at $0.50 input and $2.00 output per million tokens, Gemini 1.5 Flash for high-volume work with a 1M token context window, Gemini 1.5 Pro for deep reasoning with a 2M token window and 99.7% long-context retrieval accuracy, and Gemini 2.0 Flash for native tool calling.

  2. Modal Blog22

    Twirl Joins Modal to Expand Data Orchestration and European Presence

    Modal announced that Twirl, a data orchestrator for developing, testing and deploying data pipelines, is joining the company. Twirl co-founders Rebecka Storm and Eric Hansander will join Modal's Stockholm office, where they will develop and expand Modal's serverless infrastructure and grow its European footprint. Modal said the team's data product experience will help it expand beyond AI inference into adjacent AI, ML and data use cases.

May 28, 2025Wednesday
May 26, 2025Monday
  1. Vapi Blog10

    Introduction to SRTP: Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol

    SRTP secures RTP voice and video streams by adding encrypted payloads, authentication tags, and a master key identifier to each media packet. It relies primarily on AES counter mode and HMAC-SHA1 authentication tags, with sequence numbers blocking replay attacks, and pairs with DTLS-SRTP or SDES for key exchange. SRTP is positioned as a lower-overhead, application-layer option for real-time communications, with GDPR, HIPAA, and CPRA cited as compliance drivers.

  2. Vapi Blog18

    Env Files and Environment Variables for Voice AI Projects

    A guide on using .env files and environment configuration in voice AI projects, covering dotenv setup for Node.js and Python, adding .env to .gitignore, and Vapi-specific keys like VAPI_API_KEY and VAPI_PROJECT_ID. It cites GitGuardian's finding of 12.8 million secrets leaked on GitHub in 2023, a 28% increase, and recommends separate env files per environment plus tools such as git-crypt, SOPS, AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault.

May 23, 2025Friday
  1. Vapi Blog18

    Top 5 Character AI Alternatives for Seamless Voice Integration

    A Vapi blog roundup lists five Character AI alternatives for voice integration: Vapi, AnimaAI, JasperAI, Novel AI and AI Dungeon. Vapi is pitched as an API-native Voice AI platform supporting 100+ languages, connecting to 40+ applications, with Sesame-powered voice agents and automated test suites for catching hallucinations.

  2. Vapi Blog18

    Amazon Lex vs Dialogflow: Complete Platform Comparison Guide

    Amazon Lex suits teams already on AWS needing tight integration with Amazon services, while Dialogflow offers broader language support and an easier learning curve for newcomers. Lex uses Alexa's technology with pay-as-you-go pricing including a free tier of 10,000 text and 5,000 speech requests monthly for the first year, and Dialogflow supports over 30 languages with pre-built agents and sentiment analysis.

  3. Vapi Blog8

    Mastering Environment Variables for Vapi Voice AI Integration

    Vapi's guide explains how to configure environment variables for its Voice AI integration, covering temporary vs. permanent and user-level vs. system-level variables. It details setup on Windows, macOS and Linux with Vapi-specific examples like VAPI_API_KEY and VAPI_MULTILINGUAL_SUPPORT, plus naming and security best practices such as never hardcoding API keys.

  4. Vapi Blog18

    Narakeet: Turn Text Into Natural-Sounding Speech

    Narakeet converts written scripts into lifelike voiceovers, offering 600+ voices across 70+ languages and support for 140+ languages and dialects. The platform syncs narration with PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Markdown files, generates subtitles and captions, and provides a developer API with batch processing. Plans start around $5 per month, with a free tier available.

May 22, 2025Thursday
  1. Modal Blog58

    Modal launches Batch, processing 1 million jobs with one line of code

    Modal launched Modal Batch, a batch-processing interface backed by a rebuilt durable queue that can queue 1 million inputs at once, up from 2,000, and guarantees execution up to 7 days after a job is launched, up from 1 day. A new native handler, .spawn_map, spawns thousands of containers over a set of inputs without users managing async logic, and Harvey reports a 10x speed-up in its document-processing pipeline after fanning inputs across 1,000 containers. Suno uses it to run GPU-accelerated preprocessing on thousands of GPUs, and Achira relies on its retry mechanism for quantum mechanical datasets.

  2. Vapi Blog20

    The 10 Best Open-Source Medical Speech-to-Text Tools

    A guide ranks 10 open-source speech-to-text models for clinical use, evaluated on real-time accuracy, clinical terminology handling, operational reliability and data security. The list covers Vosk, DeepSpeech, SpeechBrain, OpenAI Whisper and ESPnet, matched to settings such as low-resource rural clinics, multilingual hospitals and terminology-heavy research centers. All can be integrated with Vapi's model-agnostic voice AI platform.

May 20, 2025Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog34

    Modal raises serverless KV store Dict limits to unlimited storage with new locking

    Modal upgraded its serverless Dict key-value store: new Dicts now have unlimited storage instead of the previous 10GiB cap, and item expiry changed to 7 days since last write or read. A new skip_if_exists flag on .put() enables distributed locking and "exactly once" semantics, and Dicts now offer data durability. The changes apply only to newly created Dicts.

  2. Vapi Blog22

    Vapi Integrates GoHighLevel Calendar Into Its Voice Agents

    Vapi has rolled out direct integration with GoHighLevel Calendars, embedding its voice agents into the GHL scheduling flow. Agents can now check real-time availability on connected GHL calendars, create contacts from caller details, and book appointments tied to the correct contact. Setup mirrors connecting Google Calendar in Vapi, with four new tools: Create Event, Check Availability, Create Contact, and Contact Get.

May 7, 2025Wednesday
April 30, 2025Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog38

    Modal launches alpha SDKs for JavaScript and Go

    Modal released alpha versions of its official SDKs for JavaScript and Go, letting developers call deployed Modal Functions and create isolated sandboxes from Node, Next.js, or Go services without writing Python. The SDKs cannot deploy functions, which still require Python, and only support JSON-like or bytes data types for now. Modal says it can run 10,000 sandboxes in either language without issues.

April 24, 2025Thursday
  1. Modal Blog22

    How Lemon Slice built real-time generative video with Modal and Daily

    Lemon Slice built Lemon Slice Live, a product for real-time video conversations with AI characters, using Modal and Daily's low-latency primitives to reach an end-to-end video response latency of 3-6 seconds. The pipeline runs a Pipecat server and a 1B parameter video model on separate Modal containers that communicate via Modal's Tunnel and are co-located with region selection, with Deepgram, Grok and ElevenLabs handling speech-to-text, LLM response and text-to-speech. Earlier, two Python Modal Functions let Lemon Slice scale to 10,000 requests per hour without managing an ECS cluster, job queue or load balancer.

April 22, 2025Tuesday
April 18, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog22

    How sync. uses Modal to lipsync 100 hours of video a day

    sync. is using Modal to lipsync over 100 hours of video a day, splitting long videos into scenes that run face detection and translation across n T4 GPU containers before passing each scene to its proprietary LipSync GenAI model on A100s. The team deploys up to 95 times a day and shipped 10 major model variants to production in one year, after moving off a Google Colab prototype and AWS Lambda.

  2. Vapi Blog40

    Vapi Launches MCP Server to Control Voice Agents from Claude Desktop and Cursor

    Vapi released the Vapi MCP Server, letting AI agent tools trigger real-time voice flows and outbound calls via function calling. It supports Claude Desktop integration and remote access over SSE, so users can ask Claude to place calls or schedule follow-ups in plain language. The server is available via @vapi-ai/mcp-server, locally or through a hosted SSE endpoint.

April 17, 2025Thursday
  1. Modal Blog25

    Modal product updates: 1M-input batch jobs, ephemeral apps, and a TensorRT-LLM example

    Modal now lets each Function queue up to 1 million inputs, up from 2k, with higher .spawn() rate limits and FunctionCall results retained for 7 days. The update also adds ephemeral apps via app.run() inside containers, Git commit info for apps in the CLI and dashboard, and a new TensorRT-LLM example serving LLMs at under 400 ms latency.

April 15, 2025Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog10

    Modal launches first brand campaign with new logo and San Francisco billboards

    Modal has unveiled a redesigned logo and wordmark alongside its first out-of-home brand campaign, with three billboards running across San Francisco until the end of May. The new logo, developed with Ty Wilkins, replaces the thin-lined cube "M" to stay legible from favicons to billboards. The campaign highlights Modal as an AI infrastructure platform, and the NYC-based company chose SF to reach the tech and AI epicenter.

April 1, 2025Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog20

    Scaling Client Intake with Vapi Voice AI Agents: A Consultant's Case Study

    Consultant Christian Ulstrup of GSD at Work used Vapi voice AI agents to replace scheduled discovery calls with an asynchronous voice intake system for his AI Action Sessions workshops. Participants call a dedicated Vapi phone line at their convenience, and transcripts plus AI-generated summaries flow into Slack via Zapier and are logged in HubSpot. For one recent client, 20 participants across the globe contributed over 3 hours of discovery, and the session earned a 5 out of 5 rating.

March 17, 2025Monday
March 6, 2025Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog20

    How AI Call Centers Are Changing Customer Support

    AI call centers are reshaping customer support by resolving routine calls in seconds instead of long waits, as in the example of an outage query handled in 30 seconds. Gartner estimates about 25% of customer service interactions will involve AI by 2027, up from 2% in 2022, a market worth $15-20 billion by 2027-2028 at roughly 25-30% CAGR. The article covers traditional call center pain points such as slow response times, peak-hour surges and limited hours, and how AI automation addresses them.

February 24, 2025Monday
  1. Modal Blog40

    A high-level guide to GPU utilization: allocation, kernel, and Model FLOP/s utilization

    Modal published a guide distinguishing three things commonly called "GPU utilization": GPU Allocation Utilization (GPU-seconds running application code over GPU-seconds paid for), GPU Kernel Utilization (fraction of time running code on GPUs), and Model FLOP/s Utilization (share of theoretical arithmetic bandwidth used). The guide focuses on neural network inference workloads, which Modal calls a revenue center rather than a cost center.

February 21, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog35

    Modal open sources GPU Glossary under CC BY 4.0

    Modal has open sourced its GPU Glossary, an interlinked compendium of short documents on GPU programming topics, on GitHub under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 License. The glossary was first released two months ago to fill a gap in cross-stack GPU reference material, and community requests to contribute prompted the move. The repo's GitHub Issues already list planned extensions, including two sample matmul kernels and a section on Thread Block Clusters.

February 14, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Modal product updates: Logs v2, live container profiling, and region selection on all plans

    Modal shipped a refreshed logs dashboard with time-range input filtering, live container profiling for debugging stuck containers or inputs, and Debug Shells that run commands like vim, ps, and strace inside running containers. Region selection is now available on all plans, priced with a multiplier on base prices, and the client adds OIDC authentication for cloud bucket mounts via the new oidc_auth_role_arn field.

January 28, 2025Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog62

    Modal adds memory snapshots to cut serverless cold starts by 2.5x

    Modal introduced memory snapshot restore for its serverless GPU container runtime, which it says makes cold starts about 2.5x faster than standard container startup. A Stable Diffusion inference Function that normally takes around 13 seconds now restores in 3.5 seconds, and a simple import torch program drops from roughly 5 seconds to about 1.05 seconds at p50 and 0.69 seconds at p0. Snapshots are built on gVisor's checkpoint/restore and are created on demand, with automatic fallback to a standard container startup when a restore fails; GPU state is not yet saved, so it must be rebuilt after restore.

    Why it matters: Modal explains how gVisor-based memory snapshots cut serverless cold starts, with concrete restore timings for a Stable Diffusion Function and a torch import example.

January 21, 2025Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog20

    Modal product updates: L40S GPUs, proxy auth tokens, and sandbox disk snapshotting

    Modal now offers NVIDIA L40S GPUs at $1.95/hr, with 48GB of memory, up to 40% faster performance on memory-bound tasks and over 100% speedup on compute-bound jobs versus its A10 GPUs. The platform also added Proxy Auth tokens for gating web endpoints, a Filesystem API for Sandboxes, and disk snapshotting that lets users branch new Sandbox instances from snapshots to eliminate cold starts. Modal additionally announced completion of its SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

  2. Modal Blog58

    Modal Sandboxes 正式可用，为 LLM 与用户代码提供隔离执行环境

    Modal announced the general availability of Sandboxes, its primitive for safely running untrusted code from LLMs, users, or third-party sources in an isolated environment separate from other Modal resources. Sandboxes offer a simple exec API, runtime-configurable environments via the Image API, and filesystem snapshots for persistence. Modal also upstreamed support into SWE-bench, where a --modal flag lets the Verified benchmark's 500 tasks run in about 7 minutes, and cited Quora's Poe, Codegen, and Relevance AI as customers.

December 28, 2024Saturday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Modal product updates: faster memory snapshotting, OIDC, async job queues

    Modal shipped a product update round led by a major upgrade to its beta memory snapshotting feature, which it says can cut cold start times by half for models like Stable Diffusion. The platform also added OpenID Connect support for short-lived identity tokens, eStargz image compression for faster builds from registries like ECR and Docker Hub, and is expanding async job queues toward a 1 million input limit, up from 2k.

December 19, 2024Thursday
  1. Modal Blog25

    Modal Adds NVIDIA L40S GPUs for AI Inference at $1.95/hr

    Modal now offers NVIDIA L40S GPUs to all users at $1.95/hr, positioned as a faster, larger-memory alternative to its most popular inference accelerator, the A10. The L40S doubles GPU RAM to 48GB, letting models like Flux.1-schnell run in 16bit precision on a single GPU, and delivers roughly 40% speedup on memory-bound jobs and over 100% on compute-bound 16bit Tensor Core jobs.

December 10, 2024Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog30

    What is LLM fine-tuning? A Guide to Techniques and Tools

    Fine-tuning adjusts pretrained LLM weights to fit a specific task or domain, delivering higher quality than prompt engineering at lower cost and latency; a fine-tuned Llama 7B can be roughly 50 times more cost-effective per token than GPT-3.5 with comparable performance. The guide covers use cases such as structured output, style adherence and domain-specific instruction, plus options including OpenAI, Predibase, Modal, Google Colab and AWS SageMaker, and frameworks HuggingFace transformers, TRL and Axolotl.