ElevenLabs is bringing its powerful AI voice tools to mobile. Previously, the company’s apps and voice libraries were only available via the Web. Now iOS and Android users can tap ElevenLabs tech on the go with a “faster, intuitive, more powerful experience built natively for mobile” rather than awkwardly through a mobile browser. Combining mobility with creativity, the app lets users create realistic voiceovers for social media or narrate video using ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech models — including Eleven v3, now in alpha, which lets users fine-tune vocalizations using tags. The company has also introduced a new voice assistant, 11ai. Continue reading ElevenLabs Text-to-Voice AI Tools Now Available for Mobile

Semiconductor giant Qualcomm is seeking to expand its AI tech portfolio with an agreement to purchase custom silicon firm Alphawave IP Group (“Alphawave Semi”) in a deal valued at roughly $2.4 billion. UK-based Alphawave makes chips used in artificial intelligence and data centers. The deal follows months of talks between the San Diego-based Qualcomm and Alphawave, which was identified as an acquisition target in April. “AI inferencing growth is driving demand for Qualcomm’s high-performance energy-efficient compute solutions and this acquisition provides key assets for our expansion into data centers,” Qualcomm explained in disclosing the deal. Continue reading Qualcomm Strikes Deal to Acquire Alphawave for $2.4 Billion

Qualcomm has made no secret of its belief that smart glasses are going to be a significant future product, and during the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California this week, the chipmaker shared its vision for the sector, demonstrating eyewear using its new Snapdragon processor. According to the company, the AR1+ Gen 1 is 26 percent smaller than earlier chips and runs artificial intelligence tools independent of Internet or smartphone connectivity. Qualcomm’s goal is to help smart glasses become “fully independent devices” that can do processing and complete agentic tasks with or without connectivity. Continue reading Qualcomm Chip Could Be a ‘Breakthrough’ for Smart Glasses

China’s Manus AI has unveiled a text-to-video generator it says can transform “prompts into complete stories — structured, sequenced, and ready to watch. With a single prompt, Manus plans each scene, crafts the visuals, and animates your vision,” the company announced last week. Manus generated buzz in March for its agentic approach to AI, and now it is putting that autonomous technology to work on generative AI, promising story generation within minutes. Last month, the firm that developed Manus, Butterfly Effect, reportedly secured $75 million in funding led by U.S.-based Benchmark for a nearly $500 million valuation. Continue reading Manus AI Takes an Agentic Approach with Its Video Generator

The Norwegian browser company behind Opera is working on an AI-powered version with agentic powers. Called Opera Neon, users can chat using the browser’s native integrated AI agent that will search the web, get answers and provide context for webpages. To do this, Opera Neon draws on previously showcased Opera tech called Browser Operator, which automates routine web tasks like form completion, hotel bookings and even some shopping functions. “Neon performs these tasks locally in the browser, preserving users’ privacy and security,” according to Opera. The company, which has been around since 1996, was acquired by a Chinese consortium in 2016. Continue reading Agentic Browser Opera Neon Available Soon via Subscription

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AI-powered cloud data management Informatica for $8 billion. The move will boost Salesforce’s presence in the enterprise space, combining two large, established software firms. Salesforce says the move will enhance its ability to deliver agentic AI via “Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services.” Informatica will help the Salesforce platform establish “a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise,” according to Salesforce. Continue reading Salesforce Agrees to Buy Data Firm Informatica for $8 Billion

OpenAI has upgraded its autonomous web browsing agent Operator to the new reasoning model OpenAI o3 from the prior GPT-4o multimodal LLM engine. The update is being released globally in research preview this month for those who subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro for $200 per month. Operator serves OpenAI’s “computer-using agent” (CUA), a model trained to interact with graphical interfaces that uses the Web to perform tasks for people. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage, and interact with it much like a human would by typing, clicking, scrolling and more,” OpenAI explains. Continue reading New Reasoning Model Improves Smarts of OpenAI Operator

Amazon is testing audio product summaries that make “AI shopping experts” available for interactive pre-purchase exploration, guiding customers through the retail experience by highlighting key product features and analyzing customer reviews. The feature — launching in the U.S. for select products — is designed to “make product research fun and convenient, like having helpful friends discuss potential purchases to make shopping easier,” the company says. The initial focus is on “products that typically require consideration before purchase,” saving time through focused discussion. Customers can tap the “Hear the Highlights” button on product detail pages in the Amazon Shopping app. Continue reading Amazon Tests Conversational AI ‘Hear the Highlights’ Feature

Florida-based Infinite Reality, the metaverse startup that acquired music service Napster in March for $207 million, has rebranded itself as Napster Corp. and launched a division called Napster AI that plans to foster fan interactivity and virtual experiences through its AI products and services, starting with the beta release of Napster Spaces. The new division leverages agentic AI tech of a company called Touchcast that Infinite Reality acquired last month for $500 million. Its flagship product, Mentor, “is a complete AI learning and development department at a click of a button.” Built using OpenAI models and delivered on enterprise-grade Azure, Mentor was introduced in November at Microsoft Ignite. Continue reading Infinite Reality Rebrands as Napster and Launches Agentic AI

Amazon’s growth contracted in Q1, with revenue up 9 percent compared to 13 percent a year ago. That was good enough to outperform Wall Street forecasts, with overall sales increasing to $155.7 billion, compared with $143.3 billion in Q1 2024. In addition, Amazon Web Services sales grew by nearly 17 percent to $29.3 billion. Yet Amazon share price fell by up to 4.3 percent after hours, a reflection of a Q2 forecast the company says could be affected by newly imposed tariffs. “Obviously, none of us know exactly where tariffs will settle, or when,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts on the Q1 earnings call. Continue reading Amazon Reports Strong Quarter, Braces for Impact of Tariffs

OpenAI has released two new AI models that use images as part of their reasoning process, “thinking with images.” OpenAI o3 and o4-mini “are the smartest models we’ve released to date, representing a step change in ChatGPT’s capabilities for everyone from curious users to advanced researchers,” the company says. The new entries in the “o” series also have agentic capabilities and can independently “use and combine every tool within ChatGPT, including searching the web, analyzing uploaded files and other data with Python, reasoning deeply about visual inputs, and even generating images.” Continue reading OpenAI Introduces New Models That Can Reason with Images

Agentic AI company Moveworks has opened an AI Agent Marketplace that launches with more than 100 pre-built agents, enabling users to discover, install, and deploy AI assistants that automate business processes. Agentic AI is booming, as businesses seek to offload tasks from human workers to software. To support that, new companies and existing ones have started providing pre-built agents that are more convenient than building them from scratch. “What once took weeks to build can now be installed and deployed in mere minutes,” Moveworks says, touting its library offerings. Continue reading Moveworks Joins Competition in Offering Enterprise AI Agents

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI

Google’s Gemini coding assistant has gained agentic capabilities, available as part of Gemini in Android Studio, a subscription service for businesses designed to make app development for the Android ecosystem easier and more secure. This agent-centric “AI-powered cloud for developers and operators” is designed to infuse AI into all stages of application development, laying the groundwork for more rapid software creation cycles. The service is available to those who subscribe to Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise editions. The new offering was unveiled at the Google Cloud Next 2025 developer conference in Las Vegas. Continue reading Google Pushes Gemini in Android Studio for App Developers

Amazon is formally rolling out its new Nova family of foundation models. Teased at the re:Invent conference hosted by AWS, details of the new multimodal series began leaking out this month. As part of the move, Amazon is diving into the agentic AI business with a new model called Nova Act, which is now in research preview. Nova Act is designed to control Web browser actions and independently tackle simple tasks. A Nova Act SDK is also being made available to allow developers to customize their own agents using the general-purpose Nova. The company is pushing for agents to help streamline business productivity. Continue reading Amazon’s Nova Model Series Includes Nova Act for AI Agents