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.
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.
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.
Modal signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to help businesses develop and deploy AI products faster on its serverless platform for GPU-accelerated workloads, which can spin up GPU-enabled containers in as little as one second. As part of the deal, Modal will list on AWS Marketplace and invest in integrations such as AWS PrivateLink to serve customers with specific security and privacy requirements.
Modal built modal-http, an HTTP and WebSocket stack that lets its serverless functions accept web requests, with full WebSocket support recently completed. Unlike AWS Lambda's 15-minute and 50 MB limits, Modal containers can use up to 64 CPUs, 336 GB of memory and 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs, so the team translates HTTP into function calls rather than fronting containers with a conventional reverse proxy.
Modal now supports WebSocket connections, letting functions on its platform maintain persistent, bidirectional links between client and server instead of per-request HTTP connections. Each WebSocket connection counts as a single input, so functions not bound by CPU/GPU should allow concurrent inputs or Modal spins up a new container per connection. Modal auto-scales WebSocket handlers, targeting real-time streaming, progress updates on long-running tasks, and hosting frameworks like ComfyUI, Streamlit and Gradio.