Latest AI News
Anthropic’s Microsoft 365 Integration Expands With Claude for Excel, PowerPoint and Word
Anthropic, on Thursday, announced the general availability of several of its Microsoft 365 add-ins. Eligible users can now access the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot inside Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. Additionally, the San Francisco-based AI startup also announced that Claude's integration with Outlook was pushed to public beta, which means it is also likely to be released to all users in the coming weeks. The feature does not just add a chatbot that can answer queries related to the documents, but gives it agentic powers, allowing it to take actions on the page autonomously.
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IndiaAI & ICMR Sign MoU to Build Ethical AI Ecosystem for Indian Healthcare
The collaboration aims to strengthen the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare through shared datasets, AI research and public health innovation.
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Adobe Opens 7th India Office in Noida
The new campus will house over 700 employees across engineering and customer-facing functions in Sector 129.
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OpenAI Introduces GPT-Realtime-2 With GPT-5-Level Reasoning for Voice Assistants
OpenAI has unveiled three new real-time audio models aimed at developers building voice assistants, customer support systems, translation tools and live transcription services.
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‘World’s Largest’ AI Hiring Hub, Yet No GCC in India is Actually AI-Native
India’s GCCs lead global AI hiring, but around 60% of workers will require reskilling by 2030, while nearly 18% may remain untrained.
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Karnataka Plans Advanced Spacetech Testing Infra, SME Involvement for Commercial Launches
Pixxel, KaleidEO, Astrogate Labs, GalaxEye, Ananth Technologies, Centum Electronics, HAL, and IN-SPACe participated in the discussions
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Sonata Software Q4 PAT Rises 25% Sequentially, Revenue Down 18%
The sequential jump in Q4 profit was driven by growth in its international business and rising demand for AI-led modernisation projects, while domestic revenue saw a hit.
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Genpact Expands Partnership with Google Cloud to Build AI Agents for Finance Operations
The partnership will combine Genpact’s finance and operations expertise with Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure to create ‘agentic AI’ systems for forecasting, accounts payable and financial planning.
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Ramp Builds AI Model Better than Claude Opus for Navigating Spreadsheets
Built on top of the Qwen models, Fast Ask is designed to navigate and retrieve data from spreadsheets.
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Why you can never get your doctor to call you back
A lot of the conversation around AI in healthcare focuses on diagnostics and drug discovery or on doctor-patient visits. But a less visible part of the system affects whether patients actually get seen at all, and it has less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more with the administrative work (too much) that happens between a primary care doctor writing a referral and a specialist’s office getting a patient on the schedule. That gap, it turns out, is huge, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting serious interest from venture capitalists. Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic, co-foundedBasataafter each experienced the problem directly. For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife fainted on a flight with their young children. Even with his deep knowledge of cardiology and the specific devices that could help her, he says navigating the administrative process to get her appropriate care took far longer than it should have. “We have the best doctors, we have some of the best medicines, but the care gap is just so wide,” he said. Alhanafi describes a parallel experience with his own father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after a serious carotid artery diagnosis. According to Alhanafi, only one called back within a couple of weeks. Another responded after the surgery was already done. The third still hasn’t called. These aren’t unusual outcomes, as nearly anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialty practices that receive referrals are frequently processing hundreds or thousands of documents — most arriving by fax — with small administrative teams. Practices lose patients not because they don’t want to see them, the company argues, but because they can’t get through the intake backlog. Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to fix this. When a referral comes in — still typically by fax, alas — Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts the relevant clinical information, and then an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to schedule the appointment. Patients can also call the practice at any hour and reach an AI agent that can answer questions or handle common administrative needs like prescription renewals. Alhanafi says the company has recordings of patients audibly surprised by how quickly they’re contacted after a referral is sent. The goal, he says, is for a patient to have a scheduled appointment by the time they reach their car in the parking lot after seeing their primary care doctor. The company integrates with the electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use, which is why it says it has moved carefully — cardiology first, then urology — rather than trying to serve every corner of the market at once. The founders say they recently turned down a large deal in a specialty they haven’t yet mapped thoroughly enough to feel confident doing well. The revenue model is usage-based: practices pay per document processed and per call handled, rather than per seat. The company says it has processed referrals for roughly 500,000 patients to date, with about 100,000 of those coming in the last month alone. Basata says it has raised $24.5 million in total, including a new $21 million Series A round led by Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures, who began her career modeling the human brain as a PhD researcher before moving into corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox and ultimately into investing. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as has Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who more recently stood up her own venture firm, Sofeon (this is its first investment). The space is getting crowded. Tennr, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has raised over $160 million to date — including from Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures — and is now valued at$605 million. Tennr focuses heavily on document intelligence and has says it has built proprietary language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automating patient phone communication for specialty practices and last year raised at a$750 million valuation. Lee said the founders’ years of experience are an asset in a space filling up with well-funded competitors. “There are a lot of [VCs] chasing around high school dropouts and college dropouts, but when you’re selling to medical practices, trust is a really big deal,” she said. “These doctors want to look you in the eye and know that they can count on you.” Basata’s founders meanwhile argue that their differentiation lies in combining both capabilities into a single end-to-end workflow tailored to specific specialties instead of building a tool that handles just one part of the process. That may be harder to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there’s clearly a market signal here. Of course, like many AI companies automating work that humans currently do, Basata will eventually face a harder question about where the line is between augmenting workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with aren’t worried about that; they’re more worried about drowning. Indeed, Alhanafi notes that the administrative staff at specialty practices have often been in their roles for decades and know the work intimately; they’re also buried in volume that no reasonable number of hires could fully absorb. Whether AI merely expands what these workers can do or gradually makes many of their functions unnecessary is a question that applies well beyond healthcare. For now, Basata’s pitch is the former: that freeing administrators from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest of it. Judging by one stat shared by Alhanafi — that 70% of the company’s new deals now come through word of mouth — it seems the people closest to the problem find that argument convincing. Pictured above, left to right: Chetan Patel, who is co-founder and president of Basata; Kaled Alhanafi, the company’s CEO; and Vivin Paliath, the company’s third co-founder and CTO.
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OpenAI launches new voice intelligence features in its API
OpenAI said Thursday that its API will now include a number of new voice intelligence features designed to help developers create apps that can talk, transcribe, and translate conversations with users. The company’snew GPT‑Realtime‑2is another voice model, built to create a realistic vocal simulation that can converse with users. However, unlike its predecessor (GPT-Realtime-1.5) this one is built with GPT‑5‑class reasoning that OpenAI says was created to deal with more complicated requests from users. The company is also launching GPT‑Realtime‑Translate, which, just as it sounds, is designed to provide real-time translation services that “keep pace” with the user, conversationally. The feature includes more than70 input languages(that is, the languages that it can comprehend) and 13 output languages (the languages it relays to the speaker). Finally, the company has also launched a new transcription capability, GPT-Realtime-Whisper, which gives users live speech-to-text capabilities that are captured as interactions occur. “Together, the models we are launching move real-time audio from simple call-and-response toward voice interfaces that can actually do work: listen, reason, translate, transcribe, and take action as a conversation unfolds,” the company said. Who will these updates be good for? Companies that want to expand customer service capabilities are an obvious target. However, OpenAI also notes that its new features will assist with a wide array of areas, including education, media, events, and creator platforms, among others. As useful as these tools seem from an enterprise perspective, it also seems plausible that they could be misused. The company said it has built guardrails to stop its new features from being abused to create spam, fraud, or other forms of online abuse. Certain triggers have been embedded in the system so that “conversations can be halted if they are detected as violating our harmful content guidelines,” OpenAI said. All of the new voice models are included inOpenAI’s Realtime API. Translate and Whisper are billed by the minute, while GPT-Realtime-2 is billed by token consumption.
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Bumble is getting rid of the swipe, CEO says
Will dating app malaise finally kill off the swipe? For Bumble, at least, that seems to be the case. In aninterviewwith Axios on Thursday, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed that Bumble will get rid of swiping, the defining feature of 2010s dating apps. “We are going to be saying goodbye to the swipe and hello to something that I believe is revolutionary for the category,” Wolfe Herd said. Bumble is planning to overhaul its app later this year, following several disappointing quarters in which the app consistentlylost paying users. In this year’s first quarter, Bumble’s paid users fell about 21% to 3.2 million, down from 4 million last year. Redesigning the app is a pretty serious intervention, signaling to investors that the situation is dire. But like any good CEO, Wolfe Herd has done some verbal gymnastics to argue that Bumble is doing a very good job at losing money. “This is a period of real transformation at Bumble over the past few quarters,” shesaidon this week’s quarterly earnings call. “We have executed a deliberate reset of our member base. We made a clear choice to prioritize quality over quantity, focusing on well-intentioned, engaged members. That decision reduced overall scale, but meaningfully improved the health of our ecosystem.” Based on Wolfe Herd’s past comments about Bumble’s new direction, the company is expected to lean into AI — Bumble is even working on an AI dating assistant calledBee, and Wolfe Herd has made manycommentsover the years about how AI will be “a supercharger to love and relationships.” Of course, dating apps already use AI to decide what users should be shown to one another. But Gen Z is trending more negative toward in-your-face AI features, and Wolfe Herd has expressed interest in more extreme futures, like havingpersonal AI botsthat date other AI bots for you. So, it’s unclear if these “Black Mirror”-like overtures will effectively attract users in their 20s. Bumble’s overhaul isn’t expected to launch until the last quarter of this year, so users will still be swiping for now.
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