Author: TechBrunch

Amid ongoing controversy over the handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity has begun displaying results for fact-based queries, such as weather, time in a location, currency conversions, and answers to simple math questions, directly in its cards, to prevent Perplexity users from going to other search engines like Google for such results. To be clear, Perplexity can already scrape this data from the web and display the results in an easy-to-understand way, but the company is adding a visual twist to those results to make them more eye-catching and quicker to view. X CEO Aravind…

The competition for high-quality AI-generated video is heating up. On Monday, Runway, a company that develops generative AI tools for film and visual content creators, announced Gen-3 Alpha, its latest AI model that generates video clips from text descriptions and still images. Runway said Gen-3 offers “significant” improvements in generation speed and fidelity over Runway's previous flagship video model, Gen-2, while giving users greater control over the structure, style, and movement of the videos they create. Gen-3 will be available soon to Runway subscribers, including enterprise customers and companies participating in Runway's Creative Partner Program. “Gen-3 Alpha excels at generating…

Tender Food Inc. is a four-year-old food tech startup looking to enter a market already crowded with big-name brands. The company is doing so well that it has already landed a deal with the Boston-area fast-food chain Clover Food Lab. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based meat alternatives including beef short rib, pulled pork, chicken breast and crab meat. The company's co-founder and CEO, Christophe Chantre, told TechCrunch that the company's technology spins plant-based protein fibers, including soy protein, into structured cuts of meat in a way similar to how cotton candy is made. Berlin-based…

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YouTube is introducing a new experimental feature that will let viewers add “notes” beneath videos to provide more context and information, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. If the feature sounds similar, that's because it follows the same concept as X's (formerly Twitter's) Community Notes. The Google-owned company said the feature could be used to clarify whether a song is a parody or let viewers know if old footage depicts current events. The release comes during a crucial year for the US presidential election. Misinformation was a major issue in the 2020 presidential election, and with the rise of generative AI,…

With the advent of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping industries and changing the way people work, and software development is no exception. Autify, a San Francisco and Tokyo-based startup, has built an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance to help software engineers complete their code faster, streamline their workflow, and increase their productivity—in other words, they've built an AI QA engineer for software engineers. The startup announced on Monday that it closed a $13 million Series B round and launched a beta version of Zenes, an AI agent for software quality assurance customized for customers in…

TikTok announced on Monday that it will generate AI avatars of creators and actors for branded content and ads on the platform. The company is also launching an “AI dubbing” tool to help creators and brands expand the reach of their ads and branded content. The new “Custom Avatars” are designed to represent creators and brand spokespeople. According to TikTok, creators can create multilingual avatars with their own likeness to expand their global reach and brand collaborations. Brands can create avatars for their spokespeople or partnered creators to localize their global campaigns. There are also new “stock avatars,” which are…

A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan citizens' private messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of web security, warned Meredith Whittaker, head of the non-profit foundation that runs the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal, in a public blog post on Monday. “Implementing such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications would be impossible without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating dangerous vulnerabilities in core infrastructure with global implications far beyond Europe,” she wrote. The European Commission tabled its initial proposal for mass scanning of private messaging apps to combat the spread…

Perplexity, an AI search engine with Google-rivaling ambitions that announced a strategic partnership with SoftBank in April, is now using the deal to expand its user base and data touchpoints in SoftBank's domestic market. Starting June 19, SoftBank and its two mobile operators, Y!mobile (SoftBank's mobile phone operator) and LINEMO (SoftBank's low-cost mobile network operator), will offer a free one-year subscription to Perplexity's premium tier, Perplexity Pro. The move underscores Perplexity's international ambitions and focus on generating revenue from paying customers, but also the motivations of companies such as mobile operators. It may not have the in-house team or the…

When Manny Griffith worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife's car accident, he was surprised at how little information or communication he received from the lawyer regarding the claim. The couple sometimes didn't hear from their lawyer for months and found the entire process very opaque. Griffiths dug deeper and found he wasn't alone in this issue. His research found that nearly half, 44%, of negative Google reviews for law firms that work with individuals rather than other businesses relate to consumer frustration due to poor communication. But even though consumers feel they can't get in touch with…