Liftoff for Skyroot’s Vikram-1; Building AI voice infra for Indian languages

Hello,

A trillion dollar opportunity.

Developments in AI have become hard to keep a track of, given the speed at which companies are releasing advanced models. The tools, however, require massive amounts of energy. 

Fusion power technology company General Fusion, which recently debuted on the Nasdaq on Monday as part of a SPAC merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp III, claims it will provide “on-demand, clean, incredibly abundant energy,”. He called the venture “a trillion-dollar opportunity.” 

In an interview with Sherwood News, CEO Greg Twinney spoke about the company’s future, including setting up a fusion power plant by 2035. 

Meanwhile, tech companies have recently slashed jobs citing AI investments, causing employees to worry over job security. Google employees recently delivered a petition calling for layoff protections. The petition, which was signed by some 4,500 employees, has asked for guaranteed severance. 

With AI seen as a threat to millions of white-collar workers across the world, demands for protection against layoffs highlight the changing landscape of the tech sector.

Lastly, as the FIFA World Cup draws to a close, here’s a look at some of the viral moments from the tournament.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• A liftoff for Skyroot’s Vikram-1
• Building AI voice infra for Indian languages

Here’s your trivia for today: What city was known as and almost permanently named "Batmania"?

News

A liftoff for Skyroot’s Vikram-1

India’s first privately developed orbital rocket has reached orbit, with the successful launch of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 under Mission Aagaman, marking a watershed moment for the country’s commercial space sector.

The mission demonstrates that Indian private companies can now design, build and fly orbital launch vehicles, opening a new chapter in a space programme that has historically been led by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Key takeaways: 

• Vikram-1 is a four-stage launch vehicle designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO), the region of space where many Earth observation, communication and scientific satellites operate.
• The successful mission follows Skyroot’s Vikram-S suborbital launch in November 2022, which became the first privately built Indian rocket to reach space.
• Demand for small satellites has grown rapidly over the past decade, driven by Earth observation, communications, climate monitoring, defence and Internet connectivity.

In focus

Building AI voice infra for Indian languages

Most voice AI systems are trained for a speaker who rarely exists in India: someone speaking unaccented English. For Ritu Mehrotra and Sourav Bandyopadhyay, that gap became impossible to ignore while building United We Care, a company focused on mental health. Rather than working around those limitations, the founders decided to build the infrastructure themselves. That became Shunya Labs.

Gurugram-based Shunya Labs is building voice AI infrastructure designed for multilingual, accented, and code-switched speech, with enterprise deployments across banking, healthcare, telecom, and automotive.

Key takeaways:

• The platform comprises three core layers: a speech-to-text model that converts spoken language into text, an orchestration layer that processes the information with context and memory, and a text-to-speech model that converts responses back into voice.
• The company says the entire stack can run on a CPU, whether on a phone, inside a vehicle, or on a company's own servers, with or without internet connectivity. 
• According to Shunya, this reduces deployment costs to roughly one-twentieth of comparable providers while covering more than 220 languages, including 55 Indian languages.

News & updates

• Data centre: People opposing buildout of data centres plan to ​hold protests on Saturday in at least 125 locations across the United States. This is the first coordinated national effort to channel anger at ‌the AI infrastructure expansion that has ramped up over the past year and roiled local politics.
• AI race: Technology giant Meta is in talks with Anthropic about leasing computing capacity to the AI startup. The move could help Meta compete with Amazon, Microsoft and Google in cloud computing.

What city was known as and almost permanently named "Batmania"?

Answer: Melbourne, Australia

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