Google DeepMind has shipped a sign-language-to-text model, SL2T, inside two consumer Android products, the first time sign language AI has reached a shipping phone feature. The model powers sign-to-text dictation in Gboard and Live Transcribe on Pixel 11 phones, launching with American Sign Language to English translation on August 12, 2026. The feature works anywhere…
New research suggests that sci-fi’s most popularly-depicted method of interfacing with AI may actually produce worse results than even badly-typed prompts. From HAL to Deep Thought, from C3P0 to Wall-E, the idealized form of human/AI relations has always centered around voice-control; and this has manifested in the real world, from early assistant systems such as…
Liquid AI released LFM2.5-VL-3B on August 12, 2026, a 3.1-billion-parameter open-weight vision-language model built to run on phones, laptops, and single GPUs rather than in a data center. The model, announced on the company’s blog and posted to Hugging Face with weights available immediately, extends last year’s LFM2-VL-3B with stronger screen understanding, object grounding, multi-image…
Healthcare providers and payers have begun to adopt AI technology; now they need to make the leap to AI orchestration. In the field, we see this disconnect manifest in patient access. Providers made the investment, deployed the solutions, but patients still face friction accessing care. We’re often asked – how do we, and our populations,…
I’ve tested a lot of AI tools over the past few years, and one thing that still drives me crazy is how quickly your workflow turns into a pile of different apps. One tool for research, another for presentations, another for images, another for video, and suddenly you’re paying for five subscriptions just to finish…
Why the industry’s next winners may not be the companies building the models. The Industry Is Asking the Wrong Question The technology industry has found a new proxy contest: whether OpenAI or Anthropic will become the first major AI company to reach the public markets. The story has acquired the familiar rhythm of a platform…
Pudu Robotics launched the PUDU ET1 on August 12, 2026, an AI-native compact scrubber-dryer robot built for commercial spaces of 100 to 800 square meters, taking the Shenzhen company’s cleaning lineup down into the convenience stores, drugstores, and chain restaurants too tight for its larger machines. The ET1 is the first product in a new…
Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires an AI system to disclose that a person is talking to a machine. It says nothing about what happens to that conversation once the disclosure is made. Founders building products on top of a foundation model focus on accuracy and price. The question of what happens to…
Skan AI, a Menlo Park startup whose software watches how employees actually move work through enterprise applications, has raised $63 million in Series C funding co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital, the company announced on August 12, 2026. Citi Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, State Farm Ventures, and Wipro Ventures also participated, taking total funding…
Ali Morin, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Symplr, is a nursing and healthcare technology leader with experience spanning bedside care, clinical systems, and nursing informatics. Before becoming Chief Nursing Informatics Officer in 2024, she served as symplr’s Vice President of Nursing Informatics and held senior informatics roles at Halo focused on clinical communication, implementation, and…