# Meta Enterprise Launch and AI Voice Model Competition

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-09-29

## Transcript

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The iPhone Duo may already have its first killer app, a virtual Walkman.
I'm Imran Shaikh and your Tuesday Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines and a little bit of startup news starts right now.
On Monday, Meta announced its launching Meta Enterprise Platform, a new initiative aimed at expanding the company's AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers.
Now, the social media giant hired CJ Desai, the CEO of database software giant MongoDB, to lead the new initiative.
The launch of the new business builds on the momentum of Muse.
Meta's personal AI assistant launched earlier this month that can perform tasks for users such as sending emails and booking travel.
Meta says it'll focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.
Over the coming years, AI will fundamentally redefine how organizations of all sizes innovate, grow, serve customers, and run business operations, Desai said in a statement continuing.
Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale.
Meta Enterprise Platform will focus on turning its AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses.
Now, the move could help Meta see a return of all the money it's pouring into AI.
MongoDB's shares dropped by more than 17% on the news of its CEO's sudden departure.
Now, the database maker said it appointed Devichiria as interim chief executive, who previously served in the role, while the board searches for Desai's permanent replacement.
Eleven Labs launched two new speech models on Monday called Eleven Labs V4 and V4 Turbo, offering more expression control, lower latency for voice agents, and support for more than 90 languages.
Now, the company released its V3 model last year and teased the model at an event in Warsaw earlier this year.
For the V4 generation of models, Eleven Labs is adopting a new architecture that allows for better control and faster cloning.
The company said that with V4 used users will be able to clone a voice with just 10 seconds of audio.
On the creative side, the model handles voice identity better over longer chunks of text.
It also keeps the context of the text in mind while reading it aloud to change expressions.
11labs introduced inline tags to define expression with v3 and is expanding those tags in v4, letting users stack multiple tags and having the model follow the sequence.
The previous version supported 70 languages and 11labs has worked to get that number up to 90 languages with the new version.
The startup said that it observed the biggest quality jump in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
Competition in speech models has ramped up as startups like Cartesia, Deepgram, Phish Audio, Boson, and WellSat Labs have created expressive speech models.
Big companies like Google and OpenAI have also improved their voice models.
Now, pre-orders for the new iPhone Duo don't start until later in October.
But the device may already have its first killer app.
Or at least its most whimsical one.
Indie developer Vidat Bhargava has been showing off an app for the first Apple foldable that replicates the experience of using a classic Walkman.
The app, called Duo Man, it takes clever advantage of the Duo's two screens.
A foldable 7.6-inch inner display when it's open and the 5.4-inch outer display when it's shut closed.
Now, the app imitates how Walkmans used to function.
You couldn't open up the duo to pick your music and quote-unquote Insert your cassette tape, then close the device shut to start listening.
Now, of course, you're not actually using cassette tapes and players with physical buttons, but Bhargava says he tried to make the experience feel as authentic as possible by recording the button clicks and the static noise from a real Walkman to incorporate into the app, he said.
While foldable smartphones have been around for years, the iOS developer community tends to be particularly creative.
partly thanks to Apple's App Store ecosystem and its robust tools that let developers build, host, market, and profit from their software.
It's why you often see developers building their apps for iOS first before considering an expansion to Android.
However, the app also taps the broader retro trend in tech, as younger consumers seek out classic physical tech like digital cameras, flip phones, CDs, landlines, and yes, even cassette tapes.
When it arrives, the app will support Apple Music and local files and will even include a feature that would let you use your Apple Pencil to roll the cassette loop, we're told.
On X, Bhargava also said he plans to make the fast-forward and rewind experiences similar to the original Walkman.
Spotify support may be added further down the road.
This is not Bhargava's first app, by the way.
The indie developer has published a dictionary and vocab builder, Lookup, a movie recommendations app, Movie Buzz, a time zone utility, and others.
Over to producer Dennis with the latest in startup business news all in about one minute.
Thanks, Imran.
An Arlington, Virginia-based startup, Quartermaster, in May, closed a $43 million Series A around its idea of using weather-hardened sensors to capture data and generate insights about maritime activity.
That idea has proven popular because Quartermaster has already closed a much larger Series B, bringing in $140 million this time.
Quartermaster's hardware, which it calls SmartMast, is a fairly straightforward setup.
The startup integrates cameras and radios into a package that's mounted on a ship's mast and can capture and relay real-time maritime data.
This allows governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know more than the current standard of AIS, or the Automatic Identification System, which is more or less just a series of location pings.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Aisha Malik, Ivan Mehta, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
Same Tech Time, same Crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.