This is TechCrunch.

This episode is brought to by Modulate.

Speech is more than just text.

It's all about how you say something.

With Modulate's AI model Velma, you can decode intent,

emotion, stress, behavior, and authenticity in messy

multilingual audio.

You get human-level voice intelligence made for real-world conversations.

I mean, Velma was built on 21 billion minutes of audio, so you know what that means.

Velma is fast, cheap, and accurate.

I think you'll really like Velma because it's different from typical AI.

Go beyond transcripts and see what a voice native AI model can really do.

Go to Modulate's live, ungated preview of Velma and preview..commodulate.aI.

That's preview.modulate.com to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for

conversation understanding, deep fake detection, and emotion detection.

Spotify hits a record 751 million monthly users.

I'm Imran Shake in your Daily Crunch for Wednesday.

Starts right now. Facebook announced new AI-powered features on Tuesday designed to let users express themselves in more playful ways across the platform. The updates include animated profile pictures, photo restyling tools for stories and memories,

and the ability to add animated backgrounds to text posts.

As meta works to maintain Facebook's relevance among younger users on its flagship app,

it's likely betting that these new features will deliver a more personalized experience that appeals to Gen Z. The new animated profile

picture applies motion effects to static photos, making the subject appear to be waving,

...