What should an AI sound like when it speaks? Whether it’s the even-keeled articulation of Siri or a bubbly persona that sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson, the tech industry has put a lot of thought into that question.

For startup and research lab Hume AI, finding the right expressive vocal presentation is key to making chatbots that can better emotionally connect with humans. The company offers a range of emotive voice personas as well as the ability to calibrate your own with specific qualities like “buoyancy,” “nasality,” and “assertiveness.”

Hume also announced last month that it will soon offer users the ability to create voices and personalities to match, using simple prompts.

The goal is to allow users to create a voice that perfectly matches the role an AI is playing in a given situation, whether that’s a digital therapist, a hotel concierge, or a video game character, according to Hume CEO and co-founder Alan Cowen.

“Our model for any of those use cases is better, because no matter what the use case is, we generate the right voice for you,” Cowen said.

Keep reading here.—PK

Anyone with concerns about the environmental impact of flying commercial should probably be aware of how much carbon is produced by using AI tools like ChatGPT: Each month, the AI chatbot produces more than 260,930 kilograms of CO2—equal to the carbon emissions of 260 flights from New York City to London.

The comparison comes from a recent study by KnownHost, a website hosting provider that looked at the carbon emissions of popular AI tools. Its research broke down emissions by how many users each tool has, as well as how energy-efficient it is.

For example, Rytr, an AI writing tool, produces 1,057 kilograms of CO2 monthly, and Spellbook, which drafts contracts using AI, produces 20 kilograms a month. However, both produce more CO2 per page view than ChatGPT does. ChatGPT only produces 1.59 grams of CO2 per page view—compared with Rytr’s 10.1 and Spellbook’s 6.5.

On the other hand, ChatGPT—which boasts more than 164 million monthly users—is immensely more popular than Rytr and Spellbook. So ChatGPT’s emissions are boosted more by its popularity than contained by its energy efficiency.

Keep reading here.—TC

At the NRF Big Show last week, it was a rare occurrence when AI didn’t come up at least once during a panel or speech, not to mention the countless booths on the exhibition floor touting the AI-powered capabilities of their services or products. Yet while much of this talk was predictably optimistic about the potential of AI, there were notes of caution buried under the hype.

Keith Mercier, vice president of WW retail and consumer goods industry at Microsoft, said during one discussion that he’s seen a lot of customers have struggled to scale their AI projects and applications.

“Last year, a lot of CEOs were asking their leaders, ‘What are we doing about AI?’ And a lot of pilots kicked off around different technologies, and we’ve seen a lot of our customers get stuck in this pilot purgatory,” he said.

The trick to avoiding this trap, he added, is making sure AI rollouts have clear business goals grounded in existing strategies rather than existing for their own sake: “Where are you going to get the biggest cost savings first? Where are you going to see the revenue growth and start to align those use cases and roll them out according to scale?”

Keep reading on Retail Brew.—AV