Welcome Mike Pappas, Co-Founder & CEO at Modulate on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥
Modulate is a Frontier AI developer focused entirely on voice, building AI models that understand what we say and how we say it.
The intonation, the pauses, the hidden meaning in every conversation.
📈 How did Modulate get started? 📈
Modulate didn’t start in a lab, they started with customers.
Their earliest users were in online gaming, where tens of millions of hours of voice chat needed moderation every month.
They team had to quickly distinguish friendly trash talk from actual hostility.
This thin line has forced Modulate to get incredibly good at understanding the nuance of human voice. Real social data from real players became the foundation for everything they’ve built since.
🔍 What’s new at Modulate in 2026? 🔎
Modulate just announced Velma, an “Ensemble Listening Model” and a new way of architecting AI systems.
Instead of one monolithic black box, Velma connects over 100 different models analyzing voice from every angle: emotion, prosody, timbre, interruptions, and more.
The result is a system where you can ask anything about a voice conversation. Like the composition of our conversation (linked below)!
Is this fraud? Why are my customers frustrated? Is this AI agent going off the rails?
Velma is 100x to 1,000x less expensive than the big foundation models AND outperforms all of them on accuracy of understanding voice behaviors.
🤔 What has Mike learned from building Modulate? 🤔
Mike’s advice to builders is to hire a bunch of geniuses and let them run!
Just as importantly, data quality beats data scale.
While the big LLM providers train on polished YouTube recordings, Modulate trains on the messy reality of someone playing Call of Duty on the subway shouting into their phone. That messiness is what’s real. That’s what’s human.
And that richness is why Modulate is outperforming models with orders of magnitude more resources.
🤝 How can we help Modulate grow? 🤝
Modulate is hiring and looking for partners.
If you know a platform or system managing a lot of voice conversations, call centers, AI recruiting tools, voice agents, Mike wants to learn about your problem statements.
Voice has transformed from just a way humans talk to each other into an interface for fundamental systems. Modulate wants to help you do it better.
Boston has historically been a great training ground for voice companies like Bose, Nuance, the Siri & Alexa teams, and Harmonix. Modulate chose to build here because of that deep voice tech ecosystem & talent pipeline.
