AI assistant

Ema, a ‘Universal AI employee,’ emerges from stealth with $25M

Generative AI well and truly has a grip on public technology discourse these days. A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy. It’s emer

Mindy gets backing from Sequoia to build an email-based AI assistant

Last year, there was an interest in agent-based AI approaches, such as AutoGPT. This year, we are seeing startups implementing some of these use cases of “let the AI do the work for you.”

Shortwave’s AI-powered assistant lets you ask questions about your email history

Since large language models (LLMs) shot up in popularity, plenty of developers have built tools on top of OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Claude to help people draft emails in different tones

Atomicwork connects workers and their companies

Sometimes the work of having a job takes time away from work. Tasks like asking for leave, filing tech requests and checking company policy also result in a lot of administrative work for HR and IT de

Automattic launches an AI writing assistant for WordPress

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the main contributor to the open source WordPress project, launched an AI assistant for the popular content management system on Tuesday. The company s

SigmaOS launches a contextual AI assistant for its browser

While OpenAI launched an official ChatGPT app for iOS, most of the AI-powered chatbots are still best accessible through the web. And that’s why browsers are stepping up to integrate AI-aided fe

Jigso is building an AI assistant to surface the data employees need automatically

Workers are being bombarded with data from a variety of sources. If the point is to make people more productive, as the volume increases, the more difficult it is to find the information you need to d

Observe.ai raises $125M, adding Zoom as an investor, to supercharge the contact center market

Contact centers play a key part in how a company engages with customers, amounting to what is a $400 billion market globally. Today, a company that believes it can improve how agents work within them

Avoma puts new capital to use making meetings work smarter

Avoma aims to set it apart from competitors by bringing meeting management, AI assistant and conversation intelligence into one tool.

CMU researchers show potential of privacy-preserving activity tracking using radar

Imagine if you could settle/rekindle domestic arguments by asking your smart speaker when the room last got cleaned or whether the bins already got taken out? Or — for an altogether healthier us

Amazon’s lead EU data regulator is asking questions about Alexa privacy

Amazon’s lead data regulator in Europe, Luxembourg’s National Commission for Data Protection, has raised privacy concerns about its use of manual human reviews of Alexa AI voice assistant

Week-in-Review: Alexa’s indefinite memory and NASA’s otherworldly plans for GPS

Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch t

AI game trainer Gosu.ai raises $1.9M to give gamers a virtual assistant

If you play hardcore and competitive games, you want to win, so it would be useful to have someone leaning over your shoulder giving you tips on how to play better. Someone who knows all your moves an

Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant

"I have FOMO for the future", says Sam Lessin. That's why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call.

HTC outs an always listening, dual-screen smartphone with its own AI assistant

Just when you thought HTC might be ready to hang up on its smartphone efforts, the Android underdog is turning up the volume and announcing what it described as a "new direction" today in the form of