Yelp debuts AI voice agents for restaurants and service providers

Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist. Yelp says its agents don’t require a complicated setup or API integrations, and can draw from existing metadata along with data […]

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Government hackers are leading the use of attributed zero-days, Google says

Governments like China and North Korea, along with spyware makers, used the most recorded zero-days in 2024.

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Some M&S stores left with empty shelves after cyber attack

The BBC understands M&S’s operations will take until the end of the week before beginning to return to normal.

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A16z backs UK startup Dex to scale ‘AI talent agent’ and recruitment matchmaker

Storied Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is backing a fledgling U.K. startup that’s setting out to “redefine” how AI is used to match companies with talent. Dex, as the startup is called, targets candidates and companies with various AI-powered recruitment smarts, including matchmaking and coaching, with a view toward improving retention in the long […]

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Grouphug is a stealth-mode startup that plans use AI inside WhatsApp groups

Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play.  Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, […]

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Alibaba launches new Qwen LLMs in China’s latest open-source AI breakthrough

Alibaba has launched Qwen3, its next generation of AI models in what experts called the latest breakthrough in China’s booming open-source AI space.

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IXI raises $36.5M from Amazon and more to bring the concept of autofocus to prescription glasses

Blink and you’ll miss it: a startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescription eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, IXI is building low-power glasses that will invisibly, automatically adjust to account for Presbyopia (far-sightedness), for the wearer. Four years into its life, Hensinki-based […]

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Uber is the latest tech company to inform employees previously-approved for remote work that they’ll need to start coming into the office.

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Reddit now supports translation of posts and comments into Hindi

In a bid to broaden its user base in India, Reddit has updated its machine translation feature to support the automatic translation of posts and comments into Hindi. “With this expansion, authentic, more people-powered content is now accessible in one of India’s most spoken languages,” the company wrote in an update to a blog post. […]

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Are EWOR fellowships the real project Europe is looking for?

Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe seems to be suddenly in vogue. Back in March, “Project Europe” was launched to great fanfare by podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a small $10 million fund to back founders aged only 25 and under, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of old. Now a new fund […]

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