AI & RoboticsNews

Is Silicon Valley ready to put robots in people’s homes? Hello Robot is.

Martinez, California, is about as far as you can get from Silicon Valley and still be in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perched on the northeast edge of the bay, the small city is home to Hello Robot, a startup that itself is about as far as one can get from the maximalist promises of its robotics rivals 45 miles south. Hello Robot released the fourth iteration of its home assistance robot, Stretch…
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AI & RoboticsNews

These two founders left Goldman and Meta to build voice AI for markets everyone else overlooked

Customer support and service are among the hottest sectors in voice AI right now. But building a product that sounds human and responds without noticeable delay turns out to be much harder in some markets than others – and most of the major players weren’t built with Africa and the Middle East in mind. AethexAI, a startup founded last year to close that gap, has raised $3 million in pre-seed…
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AI & RoboticsNews

OpenAI launches new Codex tools for white-collar work

OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool’s uses in the workplace. Together with the new tools, the company released an internal report on how Codex is being used for knowledge work, finding its uses go far beyond software engineering. “Codex now has more than 5 million weekly…
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AI & RoboticsNews

DuckDuckGo makes its ‘no-AI’ search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience, noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine. Once enabled, users will be directed to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, where there are no AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, and fewer AI…
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