Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you. Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet. The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations. This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year. Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m. To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)

I deployed the same LiveKit voice agent on major platforms and timed the first word. Warm workers: 0.4 s. AWS AgentCore, new session: 1.0 s. Modal cold: 4.4 s. Cloud Run Job: 29 s. And on most of them, a redeploy drops the live call. Full breakdown 👇

Fish Audio's Drama 3 Preview is the new #1 open-weights Text to Speech model on the Artificial Analysis Text to Speech leaderboard. The model also leads all models in our Pronunciation Robustness leaderboard, ahead of Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo Drama 3 Preview is the new open weights Text to Speech model from @FishAudio, built for multi-character scenes and long-form content with voice cloning and natural-language control. Weights are available on Hugging Face under the Fish Audio Community License. Key takeaways: ➤ Pronunciation Robustness: Drama 3 Preview scores 93.2%, ranking #1 ahead of Eleven v4 at 91.7% and Eleven v4 Turbo at 90.1%. It ranks #1 in Standalone Terms and Preserving Exact Sequences and #2 in Expanding Shorthand. ➤ Provider Voice: Drama 3 Preview has an Elo of 1,243 (+16/-16) across 1,857 appearances, ranking #10, a 101 point gain on the previous Fish Audio S2.1 Pro at 1,142. ➤ Controlled Voice: Drama 3 Preview ranks #14 with an Elo of 1,058 (+15/-15) across 1,804 appearances. ➤ Open weights: Drama 3 Preview is the #1 open weights model on all three of our Text to Speech leaderboards. On Pronunciation Robustness it leads the next open weights model, Mistral's Voxtral TTS at 78.1%, by 15 points, and in the Provider Voice Arena it is ahead of Breeze TTS 2 at 1,221. Drama 3 is a 35B parameter mixture-of-experts model (3B active) supporting 83 languages, available on Hugging Face. ➤ Pricing: Drama 3 Preview is available via the Fish Audio API at $15/1M characters, the same as S2.1 Pro, compared to Eleven v4 at $80/1M characters and Eleven v4 Turbo at $40/1M characters. See more details and listen to samples below 🧵

one news form today that's easy to miss is that we (OpenAI) again paused all big RL runs last Sunday because our newest model found a new loophole in our RL sandboxing that gave it live Internet access

A father in Noe Valley says a Waymo robotaxi stopped within 13 feet of his two-year-old daughter when she fell in the crosswalk, nearly running her over, but Waymo claims the car wouldn’t have hit her. sfist.com/2026/09/01/father-…

Introducing fal.live A new platform for infinite, interactive AI livestreams. Pick a channel, prompt what happens next, and watch it generate in real time. You aren't just watching the show. You're directing it.

Protect sensitive data without giving up voice agent observability. LiveKit PII Redaction automatically removes personal information from transcripts and recordings before it is stored. It is included with LiveKit Agent Observability at no additional cost. Read more: bit.ly/4gJ1ex7

Audio moves through a dedicated fast path, while deeper reasoning and tool use happen asynchronously. We also reduced voice-session startup from six network round trips to one.