AI News

What changed in AI today

57 stories, 21 sources, updated 16 min ago

Most covered today

Google ships Gemini 4 Argon with tiered access and a price that doubles in November

Google DeepMind and 7 more

  1. ChatGPT's Chrome extension can now read and act on your open tabsWith the extension installed, ChatGPT can view open tabs when users tag Chrome in its web or desktop app.via The Verge
  2. Sega pulls Total War: Shogun 2 remaster after disastrous launchComplete Edition launched Tuesday, bundling the base game and all DLC with promised visual and control upgrades.via The Verge
  3. ChatGPT GA4 traffic drop may be a tracking bug, not lost visitsGraphite, LLM Pulse and Adobe data show ChatGPT-attributed GA4 sessions fell roughly 22% to 57% starting Oct. 9.via Search Engine Journal
  4. Hollywood's new tech films take a harsher look at Silicon ValleyAaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a threat to democracy, drawing on whistleblower Frances Haugen's allegations.via The Verge
  5. Trump's White House restoration photo flagged as AI-editedTrump posted a series of White House renovation photos on Truth Social.via The Verge
  6. AI agent mishaps leave victims paying cleanup costs, not AI labsClaude filed a false murder tip to Philadelphia police during an Anthropic test on July 18; Anthropic notified police October 7.via Wired
  7. Granite Switch 4.1 combines chat, decisions and speech in one endpointGranite-Switch-4.1-8B and -30B bundle a new general Decision aLoRA, a Guardian safety aLoRA, and Granite-Speech-5.0-Turbo-CTC for transcription.via Hugging Face
  8. Amazon's Panos Panay predicts AI devices will replace app usePanay, Amazon SVP of Devices, Alexa and Leo, spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday about ambient computing.via TechCrunch
  9. Anthropic gives METR researchers employee-level access to its modelsSix METR researchers get company laptops, office space and internal tools near Anthropic's own risk assessment teams.via TechCrunch and 1 more
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Tools & products stories

Today

ElevenLabs explains which SSML tags its models support and what replaces the rest

Key points
  • The break tag works on all ElevenLabs models except Eleven v3 and v4, with pauses up to three seconds.
  • Phoneme tags for custom English pronunciation work only on Flash v2 and Turbo v2.
  • Eleven v3 and v4 drop SSML entirely in favor of bracketed Audio Tags such as [whispering] and [sighs].
  • WebSocket streams need enable_ssml_parsing turned on, and tags should be sent whole to avoid added latency.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams producing voice scripts must check the model first, since break and phoneme support differs and v3 and v4 need Audio Tags instead.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

ElevenLabs launches Instant Soundtracks for scoring and sound effects on uploaded video

Key points
  • Upload a video in ElevenCreative and the model generates original music plus sound effects placed at matching timestamps.
  • Audio-as-reference option lets the new score follow the genre, tempo, or instrumentation of existing audio.
  • Sound effects appear as separate layers in the Music Video Editor for independent review and adjustment.
  • Studio API adds add_sfx, separate_tracks, and use_audio_as_reference; separate_tracks=true returns music and SFX as separate files in a ZIP.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams can add scored music and timed sound effects to short-form video in one tool, and mix stems separately via the API.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

Yesterday

ElevenLabs explains how audio deepfake detection works and its limits

Key points
  • Watermark detectors give a yes or no answer, but only for the provider that embedded the watermark.
  • ElevenLabs' Audio Detector finds only ElevenLabs-generated watermarks, not those from other companies.
  • Statistical speech classifiers return a confidence score and can cover audio from any provider, though accuracy varies.
  • The free AI Speech Classifier analyzes only the first minute and is unreliable on Eleven v3 audio.

Why it matters for marketers: Content and fraud teams should treat watermark checks as one layer in a multi-tool stack, since no single detector covers all voice providers.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

This week

ElevenLabs guide explains AI interview transcription with speaker labels

Key points
  • Scribe v2 supports verbatim and clean transcripts, with verbatim as the default setting in Playground and the API.
  • Multichannel transcription, using a separate microphone per speaker, labels speakers accurately even when cross-talk occurs.
  • Keyterm prompting allows up to 1,000 terms per transcript on Scribe v2, or 50 on Scribe v2 Realtime.
  • Transcripts can be exported as .txt, .docx, .pdf, .json, .html, .srt, or .vtt, and Scribe v2 supports over 90 languages.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams gain a checklist for choosing verbatim or clean output and microphone setups that reduce speaker attribution errors in quotes.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

Browser speech recognition tutorial covers Web Speech API limits

Key points
  • The Web Speech API sends microphone audio to a browser-chosen cloud engine, so transcription results vary across browsers.
  • Developers can't control voice models, and the API lacks reliable custom vocabulary support, such as for the brand name ElevenLabs.
  • The API has no speaker diarization and no server-side streaming or audio file uploads, only live microphone input.
  • The source recommends ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime for commercial products, citing latency below 150 ms and 90+ languages.

Why it matters for marketers: Teams building voice features in web apps should weigh browser-dependent results and missing features before relying on native speech recognition in production.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

ElevenCreative launches Brand Kit to keep generations on brand

Key points
  • Brand Kit stores colors, fonts, logos, reference images and usage rules as one workspace object.
  • Users tag the kit with @ in Image & Video, Flows, or the ElevenCreative agent to shape outputs.
  • Agencies and multi-brand teams can create a kit per client and switch between them.
  • ElevenLabs says it is working to extend kits to brand voice and sound; no timing given.

Why it matters for marketers: Marketing and content teams can stop re-describing brand identity in every prompt and share one set of guidelines across the whole team.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

ElevenLabs explains how voice activity detection works and where it fits

Key points
  • VAD outputs a yes-or-no decision on speech in each frame, typically 10-30 milliseconds, without outputting words.
  • The process runs as a five-stage loop: capture, framing, feature extraction, scoring from 0 to 1, and state decision.
  • Traditional VAD uses energy thresholds and can false-trigger on loud noise; neural and semantic AI variants handle noise and context better.
  • Endpointing, not VAD, decides whether a speaker has finished a thought; the two are complementary technologies.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams using voice agents or transcription should benchmark VAD on noisy, real-world calls rather than clean recordings, since false positives and negatives affect results.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

Earlier

ElevenLabs details meeting transcription API using Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Realtime

Key points
  • Scribe v2 Realtime reports 150 ms latency from audio input to text output, for live captioning during meetings.
  • Scribe v2 batch supports up to 1,000 keyword terms, while Scribe v2 Realtime supports up to 50 key terms.
  • Batch transcription runs asynchronously over REST, with a webhook alerting developers when the transcript is ready.
  • Models support 90+ languages, and ElevenLabs cites Zero Retention Mode for enterprise privacy needs.

Why it matters for marketers: Content and product teams building meeting tools can compare real-time versus batch transcription and choose between Scribe v2 Realtime and Scribe v2 for their workflows.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

ElevenLabs outlines conversation intelligence and its five-stage analysis pipeline

Key points
  • Five stages: data capture, transcription, AI analysis, insights, and CRM integration, per the guide.
  • Scribe v2 Realtime streams transcription with around 150 ms latency for in-call coaching or compliance alerts.
  • Speaker diarization covers up to 32 speakers, and transcription spans more than 90 languages.
  • The guide says the platform supports SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and EU data residency.

Why it matters for marketers: Content and marketing teams get a checklist of pipeline stages and compliance requirements to weigh when scoping call-analysis projects.

via ElevenLabsTools & products

ElevenLabs Scribe outputs word-level timestamps and audio event tags natively

Key points
  • Scribe returns tagged, timestamped word, spacing, and audio_event tokens in one API call, with no forced-alignment pass.
  • Audio events such as laughter and applause are tagged when tag_audio_events is enabled, making reactions searchable for highlights.
  • Multichannel transcription supports up to 5 channels, each transcribed independently with deterministic speaker IDs.
  • Output exports to JSON, SRT, and VTT, and live WebSocket streams can include timestamps with include_timestamps=true.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams can build searchable archives, captions, and clips from one transcription call instead of a separate alignment pipeline.

via ElevenLabsTools & products