The voice wars are heating up as tech giants race to build next-generation, voice-first AI interfaces. Apple is betting big on Siri as the primary way you’ll interact with your iPhone and AI apps. Meta is snapping up voice app startups, and Alexa is getting a major AI overhaul. Would you feel comfortable chatting with your phone for everything? How about with AI-powered glasses? This future is talking to us, let’s dive in and stay curious.
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Apple’s Focus on Voice-First Future
Apple is preparing a major Siri upgrade in 2025 with a new App Intents system, allowing full hands-free control of apps, from editing and sending photos to adding items to a shopping cart, all by voice. This capability could power Apple’s next wave of hardware, including a smart display (delayed a year) and a tabletop robot. The rollout, planned for spring alongside a Siri infrastructure overhaul, faces hurdles: engineers are testing with select apps (Uber, Amazon, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc.) but may limit high-risk use cases like banking. Precision and accuracy are top priorities after past Siri missteps. Just like we discussed on our previous issue, audio processing has become a major game-changer for AI companies. Meta has acquired two audio startups to process and understand emotion through voice, but they lack the hardware. Apple has all the hardware to become the winner in the AI voice future, but it lacks the processing power. Other Apple updates:
If Apple nails voice-driven control, it could finally deliver on Siri’s 15-year-old promise, and quietly change how people use their iPhones. AI Industry Warns of Historic Copyright Threat
Anthropic is appealing a record copyright class action that could involve 7M claimants and hundreds of billions in damages over AI training data. Trade groups and digital rights advocates warn the ruling could force Anthropic to settle, setting a precedent that may cripple the AI sector and deter investment. They argue that class actions are ill-suited for copyright disputes and could leave unresolved the central question: Can copyrighted works be legally used to train generative AI? 🧰 AI ToolsLaw
Download our list of 1000+ Tools for free. Alexa Gets an AI Overhaul, But Is it Ready?
Amazon has launched Alexa+, a generative AI–powered upgrade designed to make its voice assistant more conversational and capable, handling multistep tasks, follow-up questions, and creative requests without constant wake words. The system combines 70+ AI models, including Amazon’s own and Anthropic’s Claude, to route commands to the best tool for the job. Early tests show improvements, like booking restaurants, creating stories, and managing complex timers, but also serious flaws. Alexa+ lags behind ChatGPT’s voice mode, struggles with basic tasks (canceling alarms, document summaries), and sometimes delivers factual errors or “hallucinations.” Missing features, like presence-based routines, add to the gaps. Amazon admits it’s still “sanding edges” as it rebuilds Alexa’s rule-based legacy system into a probabilistic AI platform, a process that’s slower, wordier, and technically complex. For now, even loyal Alexa users may prefer the older, more reliable version until the bugs are fixed. 🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. You’re a free subscriber to Yaro’s Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. Please do your own research and make conscious decisions.
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Monday, August 11, 2025
🎙️Apple’s Focus on Voice-First Future
Friday, August 8, 2025
Why did Meta acquire WaveForms AI?
This is what we have today Team. Enjoy your weekend and Stay Curious.
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Meta Acquires WaveForms AI to Decode Human Emotion Through Voice
Meta has acquired WaveForms, an AI voice startup focused on passing the “Speech Turing Test,” the ability to make AI-generated voices indistinguishable from human speech. Founded just 8 months ago, WaveForms had already raised $40M at a $160M pre-money valuation from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup’s co-founders include ex-OpenAI and Meta researcher Alexis Conneau (who helped build GPT-4o’s Advanced Voice Mode) and ex-Google ad strategist Coralie Lemaitre. This marks Meta’s second major AI audio acquisition in a month, following PlayAI, and is part of its ramp-up of Superintelligence Labs, its all-encompassing AI division focused on voice, vision, reasoning, and superagent infrastructure. WaveForms specializes in “Emotional General Intelligence” tech designed to detect and understand emotional states through voice signals. Combined with Meta’s billions of voice, video, and message data points across its platforms, the implications are massive. Here’s why it matters:
These platforms offer Meta an unparalleled multimodal dataset of how we speak, write, react, and feel. Personally I use Whatsapp and IG the most, and while traveling outside the US, you can realize how the entire world relies more on WhatsApp than any other communication app for business and personal communication. In LATAM billboards and TV ads, which are pricey, have companies whatsapp QR codes or numbers in them as it is the standard and expected way to communicate. imagine all these voice messages, being run through WaveForms to have an idea how a client or potential client feels at that particular moment and have your AI chatbot, which already creates audio that is hard to know that is a computer, respond accordingly to please that client and upsell. So let the bots respond. Also all these data can be sold back to the users, in other words, we use these apps for communication, the sell us the data about how we (others) feel in certain situation to improve our ad efforts. Metas vision: build a universal AI engine capable of real-time emotional analysis, memory, decision-making, and interaction across text, voice, video, AR glasses, and VR environments. Wearables like smart glasses are key capturing what we see, hear, say, and even how we feel. This acquisition gives Meta the missing piece in voice-emotion modeling, something smaller startups couldn’t scale due to data limitations. Now, with WaveForms’ neural architectures and Meta’s scale, we may see AI that not only hears us, but understands us, and predicts us. 🧠 Learning Corner
Meta’s Superintelligence Team Now Called TBD LabMeta’s elite AI unit is now officially named TBD Lab, short for “to be determined.” The team is leading development on the next version of Meta’s Llama model, internally dubbed Llama 4.5 or 4.x, and sits under the company’s new Superintelligence Labs (MSL) umbrella. Led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang (brought in via Meta’s $14B deal with Scale AI), TBD Lab has aggressively recruited top talent from OpenAI, Google, and others—reportedly offering pay packages in the hundreds of millions. Jack Rae, formerly at Google, is leading the Llama project. Meta says TBD Lab will focus on frontier model development, advanced reasoning, and building powerful AI agents. But this isn’t just about technological progress, it’s about AI supremacy. As users, we’re the ones feeding these systems with data, yet the power and profits concentrate in the hands of a few. Gathering the top minds under one corporate roof to chase dominance raises red flags: monopoly risks, ethical blind spots, and a lack of accountability.
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Download our list of 1000+ Tools for free. 🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. You’re a free subscriber to Yaro’s Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. Please do your own research and make conscious decisions.
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