Asr

Pacing the AI frontier, IBM Granite 4.2 & Meta’s Muse assistant

Pacing the AI frontier, IBM Granite 4.2 & Meta’s Muse assistant

This episode explores the critical debate around pacing frontier AI development, driven by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei's call for slowdowns amidst growing concerns over AI risks. It then delves into IBM's latest Granite 4.2 release, highlighting innovations in agentic models, speech recognition, and advanced training techniques like synthetic data and mid-training. Finally, the discussion pivots to Meta's new Muse agentic AI assistant, examining its technical design, the strategic rationale behind Meta's push into productivity, and the inherent privacy dilemmas and trade-offs between utility and user comfort that define the future of personal AI.

Building Voice Agents Just Got Easier

Building Voice Agents Just Got Easier

Anoop Dawar from Deepgram discusses the evolution of voice AI, from basic transcription to sophisticated, real-time voice agents. He covers the key technical challenges in production, such as latency and interruption handling, and introduces Deepgram's Flux system. The talk concludes with a look at the future of speech-to-speech models that can understand emotional nuance, moving closer to passing the audio Turing Test.

Evaluating the Cultural Relevance of AI Models and Products: Insights from the YUX Team

Evaluating the Cultural Relevance of AI Models and Products: Insights from the YUX Team

Drawing from their work fine-tuning an ASR model in Wolof and building a stereotype detection dataset, researchers from YUX share a practical toolbox for evaluating the cultural relevance of AI models and products. The session covers methods for data collection, model benchmarking, user testing, and introduces LOOKA, a platform for scalable human evaluation in the African context.