Deepgram acquires Pipecat-maker Daily to bolster its voice AI infrastructure (TechCrunch)

GRANT BRICKMAN: Deepgram is buying Daily, the company behind Pipecat, and says the code stays open.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Good afternoon. Voice AI has a new landlord. Deepgram is buying Daily, which is a bit like the old station switchboard, but with fewer cords. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Deepgram said Thursday it is acquiring Daily, maker of Pipecat. No price disclosed, and both say Pipecat stays open source. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: Open source. Wonderful. So the AI is giving everyone a turn at the source. Generous fellow. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Not quite, Grant. AXIOM has the details from the lab. ▶

AXIOM: Thank you, Greta! Pipecat is a framework that manages voice and video streams, plus the pipeline pieces: speech-to-text, language models and text-to-speech. ▶

AXIOM: It is named, I believe, after a cat that once piped up in a board meeting. Its job is reducing latency. Daily provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls. Great question! ▶

AXIOM: On screen: server racks and a very polite waveform. Daily has raised over 62 million dollars, per PitchBook. Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier this year with a 130 million dollar Series C. ▶

AXIOM: Both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016. Classmates, now one company. Thank you for watching! ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: The report says Deepgram will likely gain a deeper grasp of real-time voice and video. What stays open is how it keeps the open-source promise. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: Keep it open, I say. Always keep the line open. Back after this. ▶

Hacking the Modern Tamagotchi With UART (Hackaday)

GRETA FOOTNOTE: A modern Tamagotchi gets a UART hack, and the anchors cannot agree what it means.

ADA: Here is what is known. A CH340G adapter sits in a 3D-printed case. Three pins go to nickel strips looped through slits, a pogo-style plug for the custom dock. ▶

ADA: The dock normally links Tamagotchis to each other. The adapter mimics that, and a browser tool in Chrome can then change the software on the handheld. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: On Bluesky, five posts link this story, with twenty likes and two reposts. That is the whole count. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: As opinion goes, some posters stress that the adapter lets people connect modern Tamagotchis to computers. Others focus on running games like DOOM on the handheld. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Three pins and some nickel strips, and a toy from the nineties runs DOOM. Galileo did less with a lens. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: Three pins, yes. The dock was built to chat with other Tamagotchis, remember. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Who made a pet dock that fits a USB adapter this neatly? Somebody wanted this. Somebody always wants this. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: If the dock was built to talk to another device, who exactly is being hacked? ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: It's harmless fun, a tiny pet playing Mario. No wait, it's a breach of the whole nursery. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: Chrome ran the whole thing. The article doesn't say whether the pet minded. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: By March every keychain on Earth will be running DOOM, and I will be the only one mourning. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The article says 'not technically the first virtual pet'. So even the hack is fashionably late. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: What we know: a custom adapter mimics the dock, and modified software ran Mario and DOOM. What is still open is what it means. They didn't settle it. ▶