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Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X…
DataDome, which uses AI to protect against bot-based attacks, raises $42M
Online businesses are at risk of bad bot activity, certainly more now than they used to be. According to a survey from Imperva, 42.3% of internet traffic in 2021 wasn’t…
Salesforce acquires Troops.ai to make useful Slack bots
Proving that there’s an appetite for bots, Salesforce today announced that it will acquire Troops.ai, a bot-based service that integrates with Slack to make it easier for sales teams to…
Take a closer look at Elon Musk’s Neuralink surgical robot
While the science was front-and-center in Elon Musk’s presentation about Neuralink, his human brain computer inference company, the surgical robot the company debuted made a splash of its own. The…
The CDC launches a ‘coronavirus self-checker’ bot called Clara for people in the United States
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention introduced a bot over the weekend to help people make decisions about what to do if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19.…
Anti-bot startup Kasada raises $7M in Series A from CIA’s venture fund In-Q-Tel
Kasada, an anti-bot startup we profiled earlier this year, has raised $7 million in its Series A with In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the intelligence community, as the startup’s…
Microsoft launches Power Virtual Agents, its no-code bot builder
Microsoft today announced the public preview of its Power Virtual Agents tool, a new no-code tool for building chatbots that’s part of the company’s Power Platform, which also includes the…
Gaming clips service Medal has bought Donate Bot for direct donations and payments
The Los Angeles-based video gaming clipping service Medal has made its first acquisition as it rolls out new features to its user base. The company has acquired the Discord-based donations…
This handy Twitter video downloader bot is now seeing 7,500 requests a day
Not all the bots on Twitter are spammers or democracy hackers. You may recall seeing requests to the Thread Reader app bot to “unroll” a long thread into readable copy,…
Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that’s something of an artist – a “drawing bot.” The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object,…
HQ Trivia Is Coming to Android | Crunch Report
HQ Trivia is coming to Android, Amazon Echo is the No. 1 best seller on the site and the founder of LeEco is ordered to return to China. All this…
Twitter bots – robots that interact with humans – have a long history. The Twitter API is fairly easy to use (I made a bot that plays Zork with a…
Crunch Report | SpaceX Launches and Recovers another Rocket
SpaceX launches and recovers another rocket, GoDaddy tells Daily Stormer to find a new domain provider, Amazon refunds fake eclipse glasses and OpenAI bot beats masters of Dota 2. All…
Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley’s conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is…
HelloAva launches a chatbot for personalized skin care recommendations
Can a chatbot replace a dermatologist’s recommendation for skin care products? That’s the idea behind HelloAva, a startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, which aims to walk people through…
Spotify is launching a Messenger bot for sharing song clips with friends
Spotify will be launching a bot for Facebook Messenger users that lets friends discover and share music directly in their chats. The bot, which takes advantage of Facebook’s soon-to-launch chat extensions,…
Crunch Report | Tech Execs Are Matching Donations to ACLU
Tech execs are matching donations to the ACLU, Starbucks unveils a virtual assistant, Dropbox touts a $1 billion revenue run rate, robots are making coffee and Fitbit cuts six percent…
The new ShopBot bot on Messenger searches eBay for you
I don’t know who wants to shop via chatbot, but that hasn’t stopped a range of companies from launching their own virtual assistants dedicated to this task. The latest to…
Wonder is a bot that will remember anything for you
Quick! What’s your gym locker combination? Your girlfriend’s favorite Starbucks order? The type of ink your printer uses? Can’t remember? Gotta look it up? There’s a lot of information that…
As we’ve discussed, Facebook’s bot platform is still in its early stages, and most apps aren’t ready yet to become part of your everyday life. This is mainly due to…
Messenger is all about bots now. As expected, Facebook unveiled the Send and Receive API at its F8 conference. It lets you create bots for Messenger to search for things…
Microsoft silences its new A.I. bot Tay, after Twitter users teach it racism [Updated]
Microsoft’s newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when…
Chatfuel lets publishers — and anyone — build bots for messaging apps
Chat has become the center of the smartphone universe, so it makes sense that bots are being used to deliver information in a convenient and engaging manner. But how do…
Digg unveils a news bot for Slack, coming soon to other messaging platforms
News aggregator Digg may no longer be the internet force it once was, but it still offers an interesting and engaging selection of curated news articles and videos across a…
This robot uses a standard off the shelf webcam for eyes and solenoids for fingers to play pong. It also has the menacing look of a one-eyed tentacle monster.