ElevenLabs' breakthrough voice model

Welcome back, Superhuman. How realistic is too realistic? Two breakthrough voice models debuted this week, and while the demos are jaw-dropping, they’re already stirring up bigger questions about what comes next.

Today’s Insights

• Bland’s life-like TTS model, ElevenLabs’ v3, and Gemini’s boost

• Anysphere lands massive funding round

• Tutorial: How to generate research reports with Perplexity Labs

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Voice models might have just crossed the uncanny valley: My feed is getting flooded with a demo for a brand-new text-to-speech model from voice cloning startup Bland — and after watching it, I can understand why. With just a small snippet of audio, the text-to-speech (TTS) model can preserve your voice’s unique tone, cadence, and pronunciation with frontier-level accuracy. But critics are already raising alarm bells that the model could be misused for scams and deepfakes or have other unintended consequences.

2. That wasn’t even this week’s only AI voice breakthrough: ElevenLabs quickly countered with Eleven v3, which it calls “the most expressive text-to-speech model ever.” It supports 70+ languages and lets you easily insert tags like [laughing], [whispers], [dramatic], and [sighs], giving you a much greater depth of control than rival TTS models. Again, the demo is pretty mind-blowing (check out the British soccer commentator at around the 1:00 mark). ElevenLabs has also shared a helpful prompting guide to help you get the most out of v3.

3. Gemini 2.5 Pro gets across-the-board updates: An “upgraded preview” version of the frontier LLM just jumped another 35 points on the WebDevArena’s coding-focused leaderboard, putting it in the top slot. It’s also better at math, science, and reasoning. Google also made some subtler tweaks based on user feedback, including “more creative and better-formatted responses.”

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Cursor-maker officially lands $900M funding round

It’s official: Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding assistant Cursor, has reportedly closed a new $900M funding round, giving it a valuation of $9.9B. According to Bloomberg, the three-year-old company now generates $500M in annualized revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing startups of all time.

Good timing: The company just launched Cursor v1.0, which might be the coding assistant’s biggest overhaul yet. Here are some of its new features.

• BugBot can quickly check your code for mistakes and leave comments so you know what to fix.

• Memories help Cursor keep track of your past conversations, projects, and rules so it can reference them again in the future.

• MCP support lets you set up an MCP plugin (a connector for third-party apps) in just a single click. You can check out a list of official MCP servers here.

• Background Agents are now available to everyone. They can perform longer tasks entirely on their own, and you can give them new tasks by tagging them in Slack.

Cursor’s reach keeps expanding: According to Anyshere, more than half of Fortune 500 companies now use the coding tool in some capacity, a testament to just how much of a game-changer it’s been for developers.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to generate research reports with Perplexity Labs

• Log in to your Perplexity Pro account and go to the main dashboard.

• Click the ‘lightbulb icon’ in the chat input box to activate Labs mode.

• Write a detailed research prompt. Instead of simple queries, use specific multi-part questions like:

Sample Prompt: "Conduct an in-depth analysis of [enter title]. Include case studies from [enter time frame], clinical trial data where available, investment trends, and regulatory challenges. Present findings with visual charts, timeline of adoption, and a breakdown by use case."

• Click to begin. Labs will take 5–10 minutes to gather sources, analyze data, and build your report.

• Once ready, review the detailed report with citations, charts, stats, and a source list.

• Ask follow-ups or refine the research, Labs remembers context and builds on it.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

💰 Follow the Money: Perplexity is bringing SEC data to Search, Research, and Labs, helping investors dig into “the deeper story behind companies” without needing to pay for expensive subscriptions.

🧑‍💻 Pro Perks: Anthropic’s Pro subscribers can now use Claude Code. Meanwhile, Projects can now handle 10x more content — a feature coming to all paid plans within the next few days.

🔥 Burning Bridges: Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan revealed why the company suddenly cut off Windsurf’s access to its latest models this week. Apparently, it’s because OpenAI is rumored to have acquired the coding giant, and as Kaplan puts it, “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”

🚫 No Free Lunch: X quietly updated its developer agreement with a new restriction that bans third parties from using its content to train and fine-tune their LLMs. It suggests the platform might try licensing its data, similar to Reddit’s agreement with Google.

🪖 War Chest: Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, which makes AI-powered weapons, drones, and vehicles, just raised $2.5B in a Series G funding round, more than doubling its valuation to $30.5B.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Jots: Accelerate goals and improve skills with an AI-powered journaling app.

✅ Vexub: Create custom TikTok and YouTube videos in any category with full control with AI.

✅ Kamili: Analyze your site’s performance, navigation, and user experience in minutes — no technical expertise needed.

✅ Kimi Chat: An AI assistant for productivity, helping with research, coding, and creative tasks.

✅ v0.dev: It allows you to generate UI with simple text prompts, copy, paste, and ship.

 🎁 Want more? Check out our Top 125 AI Tools

^{* indicates a promoted tool, if any}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🦘 Running Joke: The viral airport kangaroo is back. People are making videos of the AI-generated creature boarding a plane and then heading home after a long trip.

🎬 Flip the Script: Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle mentored the filmmakers behind the world’s first AI-generated anthology series, set to release next month. Check out the teaser trailer here.

📧 Inbox Zero: Builder Claire Vo uses a Zapier agent to read through her entire inbox and automatically draft replies for the emails that need one. Here are the custom instructions she used to set it up.

📚 No Strings Attached: Anthropic keeps adding new courses to its free AI tutorial series. Creator Poonam Soni just shared her nine favorites.

📈 TikTok Trailblazer: A TikToker apparently racked up 28.6M views in a single week by exclusively posting AI-generated “Yeti ASMR” videos. “Full AI video creative storytelling is going to boom real soon,” X user Iamgdsa wrote.

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Brainstorm using the starbursting method

Prompt: Act as a creative strategist and help me run a Starbursting session for the following idea or project: [Insert your idea].

Generate 5–6 thoughtful and challenging questions for each of the core categories:

Who, What, When, Where, Why, How

Then, identify the top 5 most strategic or unanswered questions, and help me answer them to uncover idea gaps, risks, or opportunities. Structure the output in two parts:

A clean list or table of all questions

Detailed answers to the top 5

Bonus: Add one “what if…” question that flips the concept on its head or introduces a bold new perspective.

🤓 Want more? Check out our Top 1,000 Prompts

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Friday Fun

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team