After OpenAI announced the newest version of its large-language GPT model, its biggest rival in the sphere of generative artificial intelligence within the US announced the expansion of its own solution. Anthropic said Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now available in Europe and supports “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish in Claude.ai, an iOS app and marketing strategy for teams.

The launch comes as Anthropic expanded its API to Europe to encourage developers to use and integrate its models. Both are part of a bigger startup push to speed up growth. To date, Anthropic has raised nearly $8 billion at a valuation of $18.4 billion (post-cash), with over $7 billion raised last yr.

Co-founder and CEO Daniela Amodei confirmed to TechCrunch that Anthropic is within the strategy of raising additional seed capital. “Yes, but we cannot comment further,” she said of the fundraiser in an emailed interview.

Anthropic’s list of nearly 60 current investors strategically includes Amazon, Google, Salesforce, SAP and Zoom. Alameda and FTX recently announced plans to sell their former shares at an increased value of $884 million in a secondary transaction related to the bankruptcy proceedings.

Anthropic is not the only company benefiting from investor appetite for backing AI startups. We know from sources close to Mistral AI, one other LLM player, that it’s in talks with investors to raise almost $600 million at a valuation of $6 billion. In particular, Softbank will not be an investor in any of those corporations, which places it amongst potential sponsors.

Investors are currently very keen about generative AI, but perhaps consumers are a bit less enthusiastic. As we reported last week, the Anthropic iOS app, launched in early May, has been met with lukewarm reception from users to this point, underscoring larger questions on how much of the interest in artificial intelligence we’re currently seeing is only a passing fad. This may pose a challenge as the corporate looks for further business opportunities overseas.

Amodei believes that bringing its own iOS to the OpenAI marketplace will not be a simple comparison, provided that Anthropic focuses totally on work and enterprise apps, in addition to more “seamless” experiences that carry over from personal accounts for work and switch between different interfaces and platforms, and this implies it can have been a stroke of luck for a bigger rival.

“ChatGPT for mobile devices came out at a time when these types of consumer apps were still very young, and a lot has changed since then,” she said. She added that “millions” of consumers within the US and UK use Claude “and we continue to see very strong adoption of our paid Claude subscription (Claude Pro) since the launch of Claude 3” – the corporate’s latest model, launched earlier on this yr.

“Our principal focus is on work and enterprise applications – and our recent software launch Claude’s team plan indicates a unbroken trend in our country. We want our users to interact with Claude in the way in which that feels most intuitive to them – via mobile, web or API. We’re aiming for a reasonably seamless experience where Claude users can switch between personal and work accounts and switch between laptop and mobile in the identical way that employees use Slack on their laptops through the workday or on their phones once they are on the way in which.”

Daniela Amodei declined to provide specific figures on API usage in Europe, but said it was seeing “soaring growth rates that continue to increase in key European markets such as France and Germany.” Arousing the interest of users across Europe is just certainly one of the challenges the corporate faces on this market.

Europe has been certainly one of the loudest voices on AI security and regulation, especially after the passing of the Artificial Intelligence Act earlier this yr. Amodei believes that Anthropic is well placed to operate inside a European framework.

“Anthropic was founded on the premise of building the most secure AI systems in the industry and at the forefront of pioneering AI security research,” she said, adding that the corporate is working “diligently” to comply with regulations similar to GDPR within the EU. She added that there continues to be much work to be done on how the Artificial Intelligence Act can be implemented.

“While the Artificial Intelligence Act has been approved, there are still many steps left to develop detailed guidance on its implementation in the coming months, and we intend to work with the EU in this process.” She added that the corporate continues to work and contribute to industry efforts to improve AI security, including banning using its technology for political campaigns and lobbying, with built-in automated systems to detect related breaches and disinformation.

Her work on mechanistic interpretation – which she described as “research aimed at opening the ‘black box’ of AI models and revealing their inner workings” – produced a breakthrough within the 2023 breakthrough around “dictionary learning” to understand what is going on contained in the AI ​​model when it’s “thinking,” she said. “We hope to ultimately use this newfound knowledge to develop methods to guide models toward safer behaviors.”

Anthropic currently employs 40 people in its London office and several contractors from European countries, Amodei said, and is preparing to hire more, particularly for the development of the brand new office in Dublin.

In 2021, Google began work on Project Starline – a teleconferencing platform for businesses that uses 3D imaging, cameras and a specially designed screen to permit people to confer with someone as in the event that they were in the identical room – kind of.

Now, after years of testing and personal technical announcements, Google is making Starline available to customers in partnership with HP.

IN blog post In a pre-Google I/O announcement, Google said it would work with HP to start commercializing Starline sometime in 2025. Google can be working to integrate Starline with popular video conferencing services similar to Zoom and Google Meet, the corporate says.

“This is a significant step towards a world where connection and collaboration are possible no matter where you are,” Andrew Narkter, CEO of Project Starline, said in an announcement. “We will provide more details later this year.”

As my colleague Brian Heater wrote about his hands-on experience last 12 months, Starline continues to be largely a virtual experience, but it will possibly probably trick your brain into believing otherwise. The query is: With many workplaces transitioning to all-office solutions post-pandemic, will there be much demand for Starline, which initially seemed aimed primarily at hybrid offices that ceaselessly interact with distant employees?

According to A survey by Resume Builder shows that 90% of corporations with office space will return to offices by 2024. Despite the proven fact that research has not drawn definitive conclusions concerning the productivity of distant employees, the opinion of many senior executives – especially in technology — is working from home something of a failed experiment?

However, perhaps some clients will give you the option to justify Starline purely for virtual inter-office conferences. Indeed, last 12 months Google said WeWork, T-Mobile and Salesforce were testing a prototype version of the technology.

AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many apps to make transcription an integral a part of their personal note-taking feature set, and the space has grown rapidly. Apps like AudioPen, Cleft Notes, and TalkNotes have proliferated in app stores and online, but most offer a reasonably limited set of features: they allow you to record notes and transcribe them, and a few offer summary features, but there’s so much to debate when it comes to the features they provide .

The newest application within the space is Voice memos. Built by a platform that provides guidance to creators Kupmeacoffeefounder Jijo Sunny and his wife Aleesha, Voicenotes wants to distinguish itself by including an AI assistant that permits you to ask questions on previous notes, in addition to providing various features resembling summaries and various formatting options.

The creators said in video that after a miscarriage, to distract themselves, they began making a voice memo tool with Jijo’s brother and Buymeacoffee co-founder Joseph Sunny. When the couple consulted with doctors, they took many voice notes to capture every part the nurses and doctors were saying in order that they could recall the knowledge later. This also fueled the thought of ​​having a transcription tool readily available so that you just do not have to replay your notes over and all over again to recollect the main points.

Jijo and Aleesha sent out the primary version of the app in March to pick testers, and made the net app public in April.

The application itself

The Voicenotes web app doesn’t require a login – you possibly can directly press the record button and begin speaking and the app will transcribe.

You can record voice notes up to at least one minute long unless you pay for the tool. Once you stop recording, you possibly can mark up notes, edit them and regenerate titles using artificial intelligence. It also permits you to use AI to reformat your note – turn it right into a blog post, tweet, to-do list or email – and the app may also generate a summary of the note and a listing of most important points.

There’s also an “Ask My AI” feature that helps you to verbally search through your notes using the AI ​​assistant – for instance, if you ought to remember what brand of dishwashing liquid you added to your shopping list two months ago.

The company has now released apps for iOS and Android. This is an enormous advantage considering Cleft Notes only works on Mac and iOS (still in beta). While AudioPen is out there as an internet app from anywhere, it doesn’t support background recording on iOS – in case your smartphone screen locks otherwise you switch to a different app, recording will stop.

Voice Memos also uses AI to prompt you with prompts which you can reply to and record notes.

Competition and motion plan

Voice Memos offers some useful features, but as we mentioned above, it enters an area that quickly becomes crowded. It also has to contend with competitors that provide higher features. For example, Cleft Notes allows for on-device transcription (which is vital since it keeps your notes private relatively than sending them to a server for transcription), provides higher integration with Apple, and permits you to record notes as much as 10 minutes long within the free tier format. AudioPen provides many more options for formatting your notes, which could also be useful to some.

In addition to competing with other AI-powered voice note apps, Voicenotes also has to compete with native apps like Google Recorder on Pixel and Samsung’s Transcription Assistant – each of that are only available on select models but could be rolled out to other models as well. technology is progressing.

The biggest risk for all of those apps could be for Apple so as to add transcription to its voice memos apps, as it could essentially make third-party apps redundant on iOS devices. Still, offering cross-platform compatibility, higher formatting options, and extra features could be beneficial.

You can try Voicenotes totally free or pay $10 a month to unlock access to higher models like GPT-4 Turbo and Claude Opus, in addition to remove note length restrictions. For a limited time, you too can pay $50 for the “believer” plan and gain access to the app for all times (read: so long as the developer supports it). The company said it has already generated $100,000 in subscription revenue.

Jijo told TechCrunch via email that the app will feature a “simple yet elegant design,” use of the very best AI models, and an “Ask My AI” feature.

He added that Voicenotes will soon even be available on smartwatches. He desires to expand its functionality to numerous platforms as a real-time assistant. Additionally, he can also be working on turning voice notes into to-do lists with reminders.