ChatGPT is getting some significant updates that will enable the chatbot to deal with voice commands and image-based queries. Users will be able to have a voice conversation with ChatGPT on Android and iOS and to feed images into it on all platforms. OpenAI is rolling out the features now. They'll be available to Plus and Enterprise users at first, with other folks gaining access to the image-based features later. You'll need to opt in to voice conversations in the ChatGPT app (go to Settings then New Features) if you'd like to try them out.

Getty is officially getting into the AI image business, after banning AI art a year ago. The company's generative AI tool is particularly unique because it's trained on Getty's own database of images, and the resulting content also comes with a royalty-free license. While Getty has seemingly been on an anti-AI bent -- it's also suing Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI over scraping its data -- it's no surprise the company has figured out a way to get into the market. Competing photography services have already announced their own AI solutions: Shutterstock is tapping into Open AI's DALL-E model, while Adobe's Stock is relying on its own Firefly tool as well as accepting some AI generated art. Getty's Generative AI tool is powered by NVIDIA's Edify AI model from its Picasso cloud service.

"Fundamentally, it's trained; it's clean. It's viable for businesses to use. We'll stand behind that claim," says Craig Peters, the CEO of Getty Images. The past year has seen a boom in generative AI systems that produce images and text. Earlier this year, Getty Images announced it was suing Stability AI for using millions of its images, without permission, to train its open-source image-generation AI Stable Diffusion.

Amazon is to invest up to $4bn (£3.2bn) in the startup Anthropic, which has created a rival to ChatGPT called Claude, as the Silicon Valley giant seeks to keep pace with rivals including Microsoft and Google in the race to dominate the artificial intelligence space. Under the terms of the deal, Amazon will invest an initial $1.25bn into Anthropic, which was founded about two years ago by former research executives from the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and take a minority stake in the business. Amazon said its investment in Anthropic, which recently announced its new AI chatbot Claude 2, can be increased to up to $4bn. "We have tremendous respect for Anthropic's team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short- and long-term, through our deeper collaboration," said the Amazon chief executive, Andy Jassy. Amazon's move to strike a strategic partnership with a successful AI startup follows Microsoft's multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI in January, which included becoming its exclusive cloud provider.

The news: OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with its flagship large language model in a major update. You can have a spoken conversation with the chatbot as if you were making a call, and it's also able to answer questions about images. How it works: The ability to talk to ChatGPT draws on two separate models. Whisper, OpenAI's existing speech-to-text model, converts what you say into text, which is then fed to the chatbot. And a new text-to-speech model converts ChatGPT's responses into spoken words.

In a demo the company gave me last week, Joanne Jang, a product manager, showed off ChatGPT's range of synthetic voices. These were created by training the text-to-speech model on the voices of actors that OpenAI had hired. In the future it might even allow users to create their own voices. "In fashioning the voices, the number-one criterion was whether this is a voice you could listen to all day," she says. They are chatty and enthusiastic but won't be to everyone's taste.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that unleashed ChatGPT on the world last November, is making the chatbot app a lot more chatty. An upgrade to the ChatGPT mobile apps for iOS and Android announced today lets a person speak their queries to the chatbot and hear it respond with its own synthesized voice. The new version of ChatGPT also adds visual smarts: Upload or snap a photo from ChatGPT and the app will respond with a description of the image and offer more context, similar to Google's Lens feature. ChatGPT's new capabilities show that OpenAI is treating its artificial intelligence models, which have been in the works for years now, as products with regular, iterative updates. The company's surprise hit, ChatGPT, is looking more like a consumer app that competes with Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.

Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic as a way to provide advanced deep learning and other services to its Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers, the company wrote in a press release. In return, AWS becomes Anthropic's "primary cloud provider" to train and deploy its future foundation models. It's the second large investment in the company, founded by former OpenAI executives, following Google's $400 million partnership with the firm. The e-commerce company will start with a $1.25 billion investment to gain a minority stake in Anthropic, with an option to boost that to a total of $4 billion. Along with Google and Amazon, Anthropic also counts Salesforce, Zoom, Spark Capital and others as backers. Notably, Anthropic's deal with Google didn't require it to buy cloud services from the search giant.

OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT language model, is the best-funded and largest AI platform company with over $10 billion in funding at a valuation of nearly $30 billion. Microsoft uses OpenAI, but Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon have their own AI platforms and there are hundreds of other AI startups in Silicon Valley. Will industry forces drive one of these to become a monopoly? When Google started its search business, there were already a dozen existing search platforms such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite and InfoSeek. Many observers asked if we need Google as yet another search engine?

Source: OpenAI's DALL·E 2 with prompt "a hyperrealistic picture of a robot reading the news on a laptop at a coffee shop" Welcome to the 5th edition of Robo-Insight, a robotics news update! In this post, we are excited to share a range of new advancements in the field and highlight robots' progress in areas like human-robot interaction, agile movement, enhanced training methods, soft robotics, brain surgery, medical navigation, and ecological research. In the realm of human-robot interactions, researchers from around Europe have developed a new tool called HEUROBOX to assess interactions. HEUROBOX offers 84 basic and 228 advanced heuristics for evaluating various aspects of human-robot interaction, such as safety, ergonomics, functionality, and interfaces. It places a strong emphasis on human-centered design, addressing the vital connection between technology and human factors.