You can now speak to Claude 🤖 !

You definitely read that headline right; Claude has voice mode now, and that’s not the only gift the tides brought in this week 😎. 

Forward thinkers, welcome to another issue of the Neural Frontier 👋. 

Claude’s voice mode aside, today, we’re diving into interesting updates from Perplexity and the New York Times. 

PS: One of these updates involves a licensing deal. Guess which? 😉

In a rush? Here's your quick byte: 

🤖 You can now speak to Claude!

🚀 Perplexity unveils Perplexity Labs.

🗞️ The New York Times signs a licensing deal with Amazon!

🎭 AI Reimagines: Street Photography in 90s Japan!

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.  

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week.

🤖 You can now speak to Claude!

Anthropic has rolled out a new Voice Mode (currently in beta) for its Claude chatbot, enhancing user interaction by enabling complete spoken conversations. This new capability is set to become available in English over the coming weeks.

Here’s what you need to know: 

🗣️ What’s New?

• Hands-Free Interaction: Users can speak naturally to Claude, ideal for multitasking scenarios where typing isn't convenient. Claude responds vocally, creating more intuitive and engaging dialogues.

• Visual and Voice Integration: Key points from conversations appear on-screen as Claude speaks, seamlessly combining audio and visual aids for better comprehension.

• Versatile Conversations: Claude’s voice mode supports discussions about documents and images, enabling dynamic interactions beyond basic queries.

• Personalized Voice Options: Users can select from five distinct voices, and effortlessly switch between text and voice modes during interactions.

• Conversation Summaries: After each voice conversation, users receive transcripts and concise summaries, useful for quick reference and follow-up actions.

📌 Usage and Availability: Voice interactions count towards regular usage caps, allowing most free users about 20–30 conversations per month. That said, paid Claude subscribers gain additional benefits, including integration with Google Workspace:

• Google Calendar and Gmail access via voice commands.

• Google Docs integration (available exclusively to Claude Enterprise subscribers).

🌐 Industry Context: Anthropic's voice feature joins other prominent voice-enabled chatbot offerings such as Google’s Gemini Live and xAI’s Grok Voice Mode. These services demonstrate a growing trend toward more natural, spoken AI interactions, aiming to further integrate AI into our workflows.

🤝 Strategic Partnerships: Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, mentioned potential collaborations with Amazon (Anthropic’s major investor) and ElevenLabs (a startup specializing in voice AI). While the specific details of these partnerships remain undisclosed, they could significantly enhance Claude's voice capabilities in the future.

🚀 Perplexity unveils Perplexity Labs.

Perplexity has introduced Perplexity Labs, an innovative toolkit that helps users bring projects to life quickly and efficiently. Now available exclusively for Pro subscribers, Labs expands the capabilities of Perplexity’s existing answer and research tools into a comprehensive workspace for creativity, analysis, and productivity.

Here’s the 411: 

🧠 What is Perplexity Labs? Perplexity Labs acts like a personal project team, transforming your ideas into tangible outputs. Leveraging advanced capabilities like deep web browsing, automated code generation, and dynamic asset creation, Labs streamlines tasks that previously required significant manual effort and coordination across multiple tools.

In just about 10 minutes, Labs can accomplish what typically takes days, including:

• Generating detailed reports and analyses.

• Creating sophisticated spreadsheets and visual dashboards.

• Developing simple interactive web applications.

🔥 Key Capabilities of Labs

• 💻 Code Generation and Execution: Labs automatically writes and executes code, handling complex tasks like data manipulation, formula application, and chart generation seamlessly.

• 📁 Integrated Asset Management: All generated assets—charts, images, CSVs, and code—are neatly organized in the "Assets" tab, enabling easy viewing and downloads.

• 📱 Interactive Mini-Apps: Labs enables rapid creation and deployment of interactive web apps directly within your workspace, making it easy to build dashboards, slideshows, or simple websites without external tools.

📌 Labs vs. Research (formerly "Deep Research"): Research (formerly Deep Research) remains ideal for obtaining rapid, comprehensive answers to complex questions, typically within 3 to 4 minutes. Labs, however, dedicates more time (10+ minutes) and utilizes a broader set of tools to produce more robust and actionable deliverables, suitable for larger, more detailed projects.

📲 Availability & Access: Perplexity Labs is now live for Pro subscribers, accessible via:

• Web

• iOS and Android apps

• Coming soon to Mac and Windows apps

To get started, select "Labs" mode directly from the input bar on Perplexity, or explore curated examples in the continuously updated Projects Gallery.

🗞️ The New York Times signs a licensing deal with Amazon!

Amazon has reached a significant licensing deal with The New York Times, allowing the tech giant to incorporate the Times’ renowned journalism into its suite of artificial intelligence products, including the Alexa voice assistant.

Here’s the lowdown: 

🤖 Deal Highlights: Amazon can now display real-time summaries and short excerpts of content from The New York Times, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic directly within Amazon products and services, particularly Alexa. In addition, the Times' extensive editorial content will also be used to train Amazon’s proprietary foundation AI models, enhancing the accuracy and richness of Amazon's generative AI capabilities.

⚖️ Broader Context & Implications

• This partnership marks a notable shift for The New York Times, which previously sued Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023 for allegedly misusing its content to train AI models.

• Many major media organizations are now preferring licensing agreements over litigation as a sustainable way to benefit financially from the rapid growth of AI technology.

• Amazon joins other tech giants like Google and Microsoft in securing content partnerships with reputable publishers to bolster their generative AI offerings.

📈 Amazon’s Expanding AI Ambitions: Amazon has rapidly expanded its AI product lineup over recent months, including:

• Alexa+, an upgraded, generative AI-enhanced version of its voice assistant.

• Its proprietary Nova AI models and Trainium chips.

• A shopping-focused chatbot and the Bedrock marketplace, designed for third-party AI models.

This deal showcases Amazon’s intent to compete aggressively in the AI space by securing high-quality, trusted content for both consumer-facing and enterprise-focused AI tools. However, terms of the multi-year deal are yet to be publicly disclosed.

🎭 AI Reimagines: Street Photography in 90s Japan!

This week, we’re exploring the capabilities of realism with Midjourney. Some think these images give a corny Polaroid vibe. Our thoughts? A pretty decent attempt at street photography. 

But don’t just take our word for it, explore the showcase for yourself 🌟!

🎯 Everything else you missed this week. 

🧑‍💻 Opera’s new browser can code for you. 

🔍 Arc will probably not get any new features soon, and here’s why. 

💡 Anthropic unveils Claude 4.

🍟 NVIDIA will likely lose billions due to chip licensing requirements. 

💬 xAI seals $300m partnership with Telegram to integrate Grok into the chat app. 

🤳 Google Photos launches new AI-powered editor to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week. 

1. 📸 PxBee: PxBee is a free AI-powered photo editor that helps users create professional-quality images without design expertise. 

2. 🎙️ Liznr: Liznr is a meeting assistant that creates personalized notes, summaries, and action items tailored to each user's role and context.

3. 🎤 Wispr Flow: Wispr Flow is a universal voice dictation tool that works across all applications on Mac and Windows, delivering speech-to-text that's “3x faster than typing.”

Back. to. Back!

If the last couple of weeks have been any indication, you should know that the AI space isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Product releases, feature updates, and million-dollar deals pour in every other week, and the space is evolving right before our eyes. 

Like we always say, we’ll continue to be your partners in this exploration, bringing you up to speed, one newsletter at a time. 

One more thing. If you’ve found this valuable, don’t keep it to yourself—share the love by forwarding this to a friend or two. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the perfect time. We’ll catch you next time! 😊