Remastering cinema
Rajinikanth’s Kochadaiiyaan, a continuation of the Tanu Weds Manu franchise and new mythological cinematic universe, are about to get AI remasters, as part of Eros Innovation’s $355-million commitment to the UK. The company announced the licensing of its $1.7-billion cultural dataset to a newly established UK operation. Eros’s large cultural model family, AI systems the company describes as trained specifically on Indian cinema rather than general-purpose data, draws on approximately 1.5 trillion rights-cleared tokens from 11,000 films and 100,000 characters.
Voice platform with 216 Indian languages, dialects
AI company Shunya Labs has launched a new multilingual voice AI platform that supports more than 216 languages and dialects to improve digital accessibility and communication across India. The company said the platform has been designed specifically for India’s diverse linguistic landscape and can help enterprises, government agencies and businesses interact with users in their preferred languages rather than relying on English-only systems. According to Shunya Labs, the platform combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and generative AI capabilities to deliver human-like conversations across multiple regional languages and dialects.
Prices on outcome, not effort
LTM, a Larsen & Toubro Group company, introduced BlueVerse Currency recently. An AI-linked commercial model, it prices enterprise work based on outcomes rather than efforts consumed. According to the company, the Blueverse Currency model links prices to business outcomes, allows flexibility in resource deployment, and enables savings via efficiency improvement to be reinvested in innovation.
Custom merch on Amazon
Amazon has introduced a new feature that allows anyone to design merchandise using AI, posing an expanded challenge to online merch platforms. The company announced that people are now able to create new products using AI prompts via the Alexa feature in its shopping app. The service could be useful for printing one-off designs like T-shirts for a family reunion, a personalised gift or to create products featuring a portrait of your dog.
Team Argentina Gemini’s test group in World Cup
The Argentine national team will be Google’s test bench and technological showcase during the World Cup. Google will be partnering with defending champions Argentina to showcase Gemini on and off the pitch. The agreement with the Argentine Football Association (AFA) makes Gemini the main global sponsor of the national team. As part of the collaboration, Google Gemini’s logo will appear on the Albiceleste’s training kit and the AI tool itself will be used to analyse the team’s plays, form, performance and statistics.
McDonalds’ AI drive-thru
McDonald’s is testing a new AI system that can take drive-thru orders and support restaurant operations. The system is called ArchIQ and nicknamed ‘Archy’. It was introduced during the company’s worldwide convention and is being tested at five McDonald’s locations in the United States. A video shared on X by a McDonald’s franchise owner showed the system greeting customers, processing order changes, displaying the final total, and asking customers to pull ahead for pickup.