Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app. The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says. The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month. When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa mobile app,…
Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app. The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says. The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month. Image Credits:Amazon When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa…
Israeli AI agent startup Wonderful has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round that values it at $2 billion, coming just four months after the company raised a $100 million Series A. The new round was led by Insight Partners and saw participation from existing investors, including Index Ventures, IVP, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Vine Ventures. The company has so far raised $286 million in total. Just 13 months in, Wonderful says it has seen strong demand for its customer service AI agent platform across telecom, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. The startup focuses on non-English-speaking markets and claims…
In the three decades between 1993 and 2024, measles in the U.S. was relatively rare – a few hundred cases each year, at most. But suddenly, the disease has become so entrenched in American life that it sometimes fails to make headlines when a new outbreak erupts.As of March 2026, measles has been continuously circulating around the U.S. for more than a year, starting with an outbreak in Texas that lasted from January to August 2025. Before that outbreak was declared over, an outbreak on the Utah and Arizona border began in August and is ongoing. An outbreak in South…
Google announced on Thursday that Google Maps is introducing a Gemini-powered conversational “Ask Maps” feature along with an updated “Immersive Navigation” experience that brings a 3D view, road details, natural voice guidance, and more to the app. The new “Ask Maps” feature lets users ask complex, real-world questions using natural language, such as “My phone is dying, where can I charge it without having to wait in a long line for coffee?” or “Is there a public tennis court with lights on that I can play at tonight?” The tech giant says the feature can also be used to quickly…
A gunman is dead and two people are hurt after a shooting at Old Dominion University on Thursday morning, the Virginia school said.ODU said a gunman opened fire in its business school building, injuring two people who were sent to the hospital. It wasn’t immediately clear how the shooter died.Within about an hour of the shooting, ODU declared that there was no longer a threat at the campus.The public university in Norfolk canceled classes and suspended all operations on its main campus for the rest of Thursday and urged people to avoid the area in and around Constant Hall while…
This is a KFF Health News story.The first sign came when Deepanwita Dasgupta was 5 and started stumbling more while playing at her home in Bangalore in southern India. The girl was always up to something, so her parents figured extra bumps and bruises were just symptoms of an active childhood. Maybe, they thought, it was ill-fitting shoes.Relatives described the unicorn-loving child as smart, affectionate and occasionally rascally. Before she learned the alphabet, she had figured out how to find her favorite show, Blippi, on a phone. She was known to sneak butter from the fridge to enjoy a few…
Flash floods are among the deadliest weather events in the world, killing more than 5,000 people each year. They’re also among the most difficult to predict. But Google thinks it has cracked that problem in an unlikely way — by reading the news. While humans have assembled a lot of weather data, flash floods are too short-lived and localized to be measured comprehensively, the way the temperature or even river flows are monitored over time. That data gap means that deep learning models, which are increasingly capable of forecasting the weather, aren’t able to predict flash floods. To solve that…
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have poured millions into marketing. Their logos and “trade on everything” message have flooded college campuses, social media, and events like the Super Bowl and the Golden Globes. Loading audio narration… At the Next Summit, a gambling industry conference happening this week in New York, some were looking further ahead. While attendees — many young, and many European — schmoozed and visited booths dedicated to web hosting and fortune-cookie advertising, the phrase that kept popping up was “super apps.””There’s gonna be this massive convergence of Robinhood, Coinbase, and the gaming companies with super apps,”…
Blue Owl Capital is doubling down on artificial intelligence infrastructure investments — including loans to two more data centers, Business Insider has learned. Loading audio narration… Last year, the Wall Street investment and credit firm raised nearly $10 billion for digital infrastructure, primarily for ownership interests in data center projects. The company has also expanded its lending to the sector.Blue Owl, based in New York City, recently agreed to provide $240 million of financing for a data center in Minneapolis that was purchased by investors Cloud Capital and Arcapita Group, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction.The company…