The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology across all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
In fact, it’s already seeing an uptick in consumer complaint cases in some areas, like voice cloning fraud, Khan said.
Asked what areas of AI the FTC was watching, Khan explained that it was everything.
Of course, policing AI comes with its challenges, despite the number of technologists the FTC has hired to help in this area.
Another area of focus for the FTC is the focus on what openness really means in the AI context, Khan explained.
Currently invite-only, Airchat is already ranked #27 in social networking on Apple’s App Store.
The difference is that the posts and replies are audio recordings, which the app then transcribes.
When you open Airchat, messages automatically start playing, and you quickly cycle through them by swiping up and down.
After joining Airchat this morning, most of the posts I saw were about the app itself, with Ravikant and Norgard answering questions and soliciting feedback.
“Humans are all meant to get along with other humans, it just requires the natural voice,” Ravikant said.
Google is rolling out the April update to ChromeOS users with features like the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts and mouse button actions.
The update also brings improved offline text-to-speech voice support.
The ChromeOS M123 update is rolling out to users over the next few days.
The main new feature is a way to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to actions.
The company said that the keyboard customization shortcut will be enabled by default with the next ChromeOS update M124.
Hardware maker Rabbit has tapped a partnership with ElevenLabs to power voice commands on its devices.
The Rabbit r1 will ship with ElevenLabs’ tech, which will enable voice commands from the users and how the pocket AI device talks back to them.
ElevenLabs said that while r1 was poised for voice interaction from the start, the company’s low latency models will make interactions more human-like.
Our collaboration is about making the r1 a truly dynamic co-pilot, ” ElevenLabs’ CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a prepared statement.
In January, Rabbit said that it will use Perplexity AI’s solutions to answer users’ questions on the device.
Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents.
Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.
“Everybody now is like: ‘hey, we need real-time voice AI bots that can perceive what is being said and that can understand and generate a response — and then they can speak back,'” he said.
The Aura model, just like all of the company’s other models, were trained in-house.
This is particularly true in Europe in the context of GDPR: While many companies are hoping to build AI on top of voice data, in many cases, this requires removing biometric information first.
This is where Nijta hopes to help: by providing AI-powered speech anonymization technology to clients that need to comply with privacy requirements.
The startup also says that Nijta Voice Harbor’s protection is irreversible, unlike some of the voice modifications unwisely used by media outlets hoping to protect victims they interview.
A lack of awareness of privacy issues around voice is one of the challenges Nijta will have to face.
This is also why starting with B2B and Europe seems to make sense: Even if customers aren’t pushing for voice privacy, risking a hefty fine is turning companies into early adopters.
The five finalists to emerge from the Four Years From Now 2024 pitch competitionLong ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically named “Four Years From Now”.
Thus, out of hundreds of startups that applied and pitched, five finalists were selected by a panel of industry experts and investors after pitching their projects on stage.
Here’s a quick run-down of the five finalists to emerge from the competition.
The company is from South Korea and has raised $21.3 million to date.
WHISPPThis “Assistive Voice Tech and Calling App” was covered by TechCrunch last January.
The new update has a scan feature, which lets users scan a physical document and import the text to listen to it later.
The company is introducing a feature to let users read their emails by integrating their Gmail accounts.
The app can also help users import their PDF attachments into the Speechify app.
For instance, read later app Pocket, which is owned by Mozilla, has an in-app text-to-speech feature.
Speechify wants to stand out in this market and wants to become a one-stop shop for anyone thinking about reading experiences by offering all kinds of integrations.
The new update has a scan feature, which lets users scan a physical document and import the text to listen to it later.
The company is introducing a feature to let users read their emails by integrating their Gmail accounts.
The app can also help users import their PDF attachments into the Speechify app.
For instance, read later app Pocket, which is owned by Mozilla, has an in-app text-to-speech feature.
Speechify wants to stand out in this market and wants to become a one-stop shop for anyone thinking about reading experiences by offering all kinds of integrations.
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls.
Now, the company is extending this feature to voice and video messages.
Users can hit the mic icon to start recording and then pull up to tap on the “view-once” icon to allow the recipient to hear the voice message or look at the video message just once.
Additionally, Telegram is rolling out the ability to pause and resume recording for voice and video messages through the same menu.
Telegram is also adding a way for people to see when the recipient reads your message in one-on-one private chats.
