Author: Advanced AI Editor
getty LegalOn Technologies, a Tokyo and San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to speed up contract reviews, has raised $50 million in a funding round led by the growth equity team at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. The Series E round also attracted participation from U.S. and Japan-based venture capital firm World Innovation Lab and Japanese law firm Mori Hamada & Matsumoto, as well as Mizuho Bank and Shoko Chukin Bank, LegalOn said in a statement on Thursday. The round brought the startup’s total funding raised to $200 million, according to LegalOn. LegalOn was founded in Japan in 2017 by former Mori…
Commercial contextTelecom call centers are under strain from rising volumes of routine customer calls such as billing inquiries, service faults, and upgrade requests. These low-complexity issues account for a large share of interactions. They still, however, require human handling due to the limits of legacy systems.Alternatives, such as traditional chatbots and scripted flows don’t support multi-turn dialogue or access to real-time customer data. As a result, contact centers face growing backlogs, inconsistent resolution quality, and high support costs.CSPs need to find a solution that reduces cost-to-serve while also protecting customer data. Most genAI tools are cloud-based and resource-heavy, which raises…
This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals every month that may have flown under the radar. Check out our June entry here. A host of funded startups caught our attention this month, ranging from a flu vaccine developer to a startup identifying AI deepfakes to another mapping underground utilities. Let’s take a closer look. Startup eyes $96M Series B to help see underground Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. In fact, when it comes to things like underground utility lines or pipes, knowing they exist before you start excavating…
Category Artificial Intelligence Date July 25, 2025 Picture walking into your office tomorrow morning and finding that overnight, your customer service backlog disappeared, inventory got optimized perfectly, and three new market opportunities were identified and analyzed. That’s how AI Agents work! This scenario plays out daily at companies deploying AI agents, with Gartner’s latest research showing that these will autonomously take care of almost 80% of customer service issues commonly existing in the industry, that too, without any human intervention. The numbers tell a compelling story about transformation happening right now. Yet despite this momentum, confusion persists about ‘What are…
AI writing is everywhere now, flooding social media, websites, and emails—so you’re probably encountering it more than you realize.That email you just received, the product review you’re reading, or the Reddit post that sounds oddly corporate might all be generated by tools like AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. The writing often appears polished, maybe too polished, hitting every point perfectly while maintaining an unnaturally enthusiastic tone throughout. While AI detectors promise to catch machine-generated text, they’re often unreliable and miss the subtler signs that reveal when algorithms have done the heavy lifting. You don’t need fancy software or…
Washington CNN — Dozens of AI industry leaders, academics and even some celebrities on Tuesday called for reducing the risk of global annihilation due to artificial intelligence, arguing in a brief statement that the threat of an AI extinction event should be a top global priority. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” read the statement published by the Center for AI Safety. The statement was signed by leading industry officials including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; the so-called “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton; top executives…
DMOSpeech 2 optimizes duration prediction and introduces teacher-guided sampling to enhance speech synthesis performance and diversity. Diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have made remarkable progress in zero-shot speech synthesis, yet optimizing all components for perceptual metrics remains challenging. Prior work with DMOSpeech demonstrated direct metric optimization for speech generation components, but duration prediction remained unoptimized. This paper presents DMOSpeech 2, which extends metric optimization to the duration predictor through a reinforcement learning approach. The proposed system implements a novel duration policy framework using group relative preference optimization (GRPO) with speaker similarity and word error rate as reward signals. By optimizing this…
SoftwarePhoto: photo for everything – stock.adobe.comJuly 25, 2025NatWest Group, an insurance and banking holding company, announced a five year partnership with Amazon Web Services and Accenture to improve its data, analytics and AI capabilities. With these tools, NatWest aims to improve the overall banking experience for customers, according to a press release.It will utilize AWS and Accenture’s cloud and AI tools to perform the following tasks:Offer deep data insights into customers for relationship managers.Provide personalized customer experiences with custom recommendations, products and support.Consolidate data into one platform.Improve onboarding time through digital verification and streamlined documentation.Improved security tools.”NatWest is working with…
Advanced AI chips worth at least $1 billion were reportedly smuggled into China three months after the administration of President Donald Trump strengthened export controls. Financial Times (FT) reported Nvidia’s high-performance B200 AI chips are widely available in China through a thriving black market for US chips which are banned for sale in the country. The newspaper cited dozens of sales contracts, company filings and multiple people with direct knowledge of the illicit deals. FT noted the B200 processors are widely used by US heavyweights OpenAI, Google and Meta Platforms to train their latest AI systems. In May, FT explained…
Proponents of online hustle culture talk often talk about getting up as early as possible, but a recent Nobel Prize winner — and one of the most consequential CEOs of the age — does things a little differently.Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis goes to sleep when many people are just about getting up — at 4 in the morning. “I think I probably have some quite unusual habits,” he had said on a podcast in 2017. “I generally sleep at about 4 in the morning. I’ll get in to work around 10 a.m., do a full day’s work in the…