November 21, 2024

The Download: AI replicas, and China’s climate role

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI can now create a replica of your personality Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your…

August 2023

Calm’s new Sleep Story is narrated by TikTok’s text-to-speech voice artist

August 29, 2023
Calm is introducing a new Sleep Story that is narrated by the voice behind TikTok’s text-to-speech voice, the company announced on Tuesday. Kat Callaghan, a Canadian radio host and voiceover artist who voices the perky and robot-like voice on TikTok, worked with Calm to help users drift off to sleep in a new Sleep Story. […]

Peruse all the partner sessions at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

August 29, 2023
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is set to kick off three jam-packed days on September 19–12 in San Francisco. This is the startup world’s Super Bowl, and you do not want to sit on the sidelines. Get in the game and check out the incredible roster of sessions that our partners will bring onto the field. Flag […]

Rockset lands $44M to power real-time search and analytics apps

August 29, 2023
Rockset, a company building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics, today announced that it raised $44 million — $37 million in equity and $7 million in debt — led by ICON Ventures with participation from Glynn Capital, Four River Partners, K5 Global, Sequoia and Greylock. CEO Venkat Venkataramani says that the new capital, […]

Quora’s Poe launches bot search, announces enterprise package

August 29, 2023
Quora’s AI chatbot product Poe is still being updated at a rapid pace as the company announced new features over the past few days including the ability to search for custom bots and a new enterprise tier for its premium plans. In an email sent to customers over the weekend, Poe announced that it will […]

The Download: watermarking AI images, and WorldCoin’s backlash

August 29, 2023
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images The news: Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool which labels whether pictures have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID,…

Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images

August 29, 2023
Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google’s AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud’s machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then…

Amazon acquires Fig, a startup building autocomplete for the command line

August 29, 2023
Amazon has acquired Fig, a Y Combinator (YC) alum that has been setting out to turbo-charge the command line terminal. In a blog post published yesterday, CEO and cofounder Brendan Falk said that Amazon was acquiring Fig’s technology, while its employees — including two cofounders — would be joining Amazon’s cloud subsidiary AWS. Terms of […]