The subject has been a massive question mark looming over Cupertino for the last few years, as competitors like Google and Microsoft have embraced generative AI.
Apple’s near-term strategy is a deep integration between existing properties and generative AI, with Siri at the center.
Rather than replacing Assistant outright, Google has been integrating its generative AI platform into different applications.
Smart speakers have a broader bellwether for platforms like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.
Other people do it well.”The company’s approach to generative AI is currently in the same place.
Brave announced on Wednesday that it’s bringing its AI assistant, called Leo, to iPhone and iPad users.
The iOS launch of Leo brings voice-to-text capability, which isn’t available in the Android version of the AI assistant.
By giving access to a built-in AI assistant, Brave is hoping users won’t turn to ChatGPT or other similar services.
Brave isn’t the only browser company to launch an AI assistant; Opera launched an AI assistant called Aria last year.
To access Leo, open the browser, start typing in the address bar and then select “Ask Leo.” Leo is an opt-in feature and can be disabled via the app’s settings.
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open-source large language models (LLMs), and is supported by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the quality of content generated by AI.
All that eventually brought her focus to sales and presales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team — a presales team or solutions engineers — and they are usually the unsung heroes of the organization.
Sales and presales teams lack the necessary tooling to handle this new selling environment.
We are excited to back the SiftHub team and be a part of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, a partner at Blume Ventures.
A new app from a startup called Cherry is aiming to transform the online shopping experience with its AI assistant that allows users to discover products across the internet using just a screenshot or image.
Cherry helps you find products that you’ve come across while scrolling through social media or have seen in real-life.
“My motivation for creating Cherry stemmed from a personal frustration with the time-consuming process of finding and comparing products online,” Kim told TechCrunch.
Plus, users can also share their search results with their friends or on social media.
“While Google Lens offers general image-based search capabilities, Cherry is specifically tailored for the shopping experience,” Kim said.
The big storyLast week, I wrote about two startups — Sunset and SimpleClosure — that help other startups shut down raising capital.
It was a deep dive into how and why this business has become one that is so sought after by investors.
I also covered Stripe’s tender offer that resulted in a 30% higher bump in valuation — to $65 billion — for the payments giant.
She emphasized, though, that the company had not made any cuts as a consequence of launching this AI assistant.
Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury management,” closed a financing round of $16 million Series A led by Creandum.
Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users.
The assistant allows users to ask questions, translate pages, summarize pages, create content and more.
With Leo, Brave is hoping its users won’t have to turn to ChatGPT or other popular LLMs for tasks and queries, and will instead use its service instead.
If you’re not seeing Brave Leo for Android yet, that’s because it will be rolled out in phases over the next few days.
Brave isn’t the only browser company to recently launch an AI assistant, as Opera launched an AI assistant called Aria last year.
On Android, Gemini also breaks Google Assistant’s song recognition.
So imagine my frustration when I discovered that Gemini on Android can’t recognize songs — or even perform the basic task of funneling song ID requests to Google Assistant.
Or, were I using a conventional home screen, I could place the dedicated song ID shortcut.
Perhaps it’s sophisticated in other ways — ways I haven’t discovered yet, frankly.
Full transparency, I’ve reached out to Google about song recognition via Gemini and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows.
Founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI originally positioned itself as an AI company with an open-source focus.
Mistral AI’s business model looks more and more like OpenAI’s business model as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API and usage-based pricing.
Mistral AI claims that it ranks second after GPT-4 based on several benchmarks.
The first benefit of that partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
Smaller companies are just as eager to use AI tech to supercharge their sales processes as their bigger competitors.
Darwin AI, a Brazil-based AI startup, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America who want to get into AI, but don’t have an IT staff.
The assistant is designed to interact with customers in a more human-like manner to help generate more revenue.
Using AI, Darwin takes into account the needs of companies and then filters leads and customers.
As more companies implement automation into their processes, the conversational AI market is expected to grow over 20% annually through 2030.
Now it’s building out its suite of AI products with the launch of its AI assistant CoPilot.
PatSnap CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tiong tells TechCrunch that PatSnap exists to remove friction in the innovation process for its customers, both within IP and R&D teams, and between them.
IP teams can use PatSnap’s AI tools to analyze their markets and protect inventions at scale, says Tiong.
What CoPilot does is build further onto PatSnap’s AI products.
It enables IP and R&D teams to find what they need more quickly within patents, non-patent literature and technical news.
