Tootfinder

Elon Musk says Tesla's robotaxi service will "tentatively" begin on June 22 in Austin, with first autonomous deliveries of a car to a customer's home on June 28 (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/10/elon-musk-

Elon Musk says Tesla robotaxi rides in Austin 'tentatively' set to begin June 22
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X on Tuesday that the first self-driving Tesla will reach a customer's house on June 28.

now i really want to try Cheddar Bay biscuits https://mas.to/@carnage4life/114830335171951140

Check out today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
--Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware,
--McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws,
--Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol,
--Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach,
--Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets,
--Ni…

UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware, McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws, Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol, Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach, Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets, much more

A security researcher said
flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal
exposed the private information
and vehicle data of its customers,
and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness,
told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered
allowed the creation of an admin account
that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carma…

Security flaws in a carmaker's web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere | TechCrunch
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that the flaws he discovered in the carmaker's centralized dealer portal exposed vast access to customer and vehicle data. With this access, Zveare said he could remotely take over a customer's account and unlock their cars, and more.

In three of the four weeks since WWDC, the conversion rate for OmniFocus on visionOS has been above 71%. (In the other week it was still above 62%, so the overall conversion rate for the full period is above 70%.)
I'm not suggesting everyone run out and make visionOS apps today: the total market size is still small. But it's a good sign for customer enthusiasm on the platform.
(As a company who specialized in building NeXT apps, we're no strangers to tiny markets with…

Customer just asked us to upgrade-in-place their 12yo RoR-based PM app currently running on Ubuntu 12.
Not looking forward to this fun.
#Sysadminnery

Plex tells customers to reset their passwords after suffering data breach that includes email addresses, usernames, and passwords (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/plex-tells-users-to-re…

Plex tells users to reset passwords after new data breach
Media streaming platform Plex is warning customers to reset passwords after suffering a data breach in which a hacker was able to steal customer authentication data from one of its databases.

It's great to see this innovation coming to life! The Recharge 100 🔌 DC fast charging network in 🇸🇪 Sweden (SE3 region) is awaiting final TSO approval to deliver Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCR) to help balance the grid!
https://www.linked…

#virtualpowerplant #evcharging #flexibility #gridintegration #energytransition #flexecharge #recharge | FLEXECHARGE | 26 comments
🌍🔌 BIG NEWS: announcing the first-ever large-scale Virtual Power Plant project on DC-chargers! ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ We’re excited to welcome Recharge, the largest rapid charging network in the Nordics, as our customer! Together with Fever (BSP partner), we’ve deployed the first Virtual Power Plant (VPP) on public DC fast chargers in 🇸🇪 Sweden’s SE3 region. Nearly 100 high-power chargers across 60+ sites are now aggregated to: ⚡ Keep drivers powered up without disruption ⚡ Provi…

Do you invest in #crypto or are you a public figure? You should take action to prevent a SIM swap attack. #cybersecurity
From: @…

With Vauxhall finally able to acknowledge that the 3rd party warranty *that they sold us* is valid to start work on the OBC replacement, we get to pick up the car we traded the Corsa in for tomorrow!
(this was an epic journey of how not to do customer service - not Vauxhall's fault, but a franchised dealer here. I bet they don't treat their Ferrari customers like this...)

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says the division has $106B in unfulfilled customer contract commitments, with an expected revenue of $58B by 2027 (Davey Alba/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-09/google-cloud-…

Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce
Arnav Attri, Anuj Attri, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04708

Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce
Customer reviews on e-commerce platforms capture critical affective signals that drive purchasing decisions. However, no existing research has explored the joint task of emotion detection and explanatory span identification in e-commerce reviews - a crucial gap in understanding what triggers customer emotional responses. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel joint task unifying Emotion detection and Opinion Trigger extraction (EOT), which explicitly models the relationship between causal text …

Google and Cisco, have disclosed separate data breaches stemming from voice phishing (vishing) attacks that compromised customer information stored in cloud-based CRM systems.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/security/google-and-ci…

Google and Cisco confirm data breaches linked to vishing attacks
Google and Cisco, have disclosed separate data breaches stemming from voice phishing (vishing) attacks that compromised customer information stored in cloud-based CRM systems.

Exploit Tool Invocation Prompt for Tool Behavior Hijacking in LLM-Based Agentic System
Yu Liu, Yuchong Xie, Mingyu Luo, Zesen Liu, Zhixiang Zhang, Kaikai Zhang, Zongjie Li, Ping Chen, Shuai Wang, Dongdong She
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05755

Exploit Tool Invocation Prompt for Tool Behavior Hijacking in LLM-Based Agentic System
LLM-based agentic systems leverage large language models to handle user queries, make decisions, and execute external tools for complex tasks across domains like chatbots, customer service, and software engineering. A critical component of these systems is the Tool Invocation Prompt (TIP), which defines tool interaction protocols and guides LLMs to ensure the security and correctness of tool usage. Despite its importance, TIP security has been largely overlooked. This work investigates TIP-rela…

Trump says JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America rejected him as a customer
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/05/trump-jpmorgan-chase-bank-of-america-rejected-bank-customer.html

Check out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Chinese espionage campaign targeted House staffers ahead of trade talks,
--Ethical hackers uncover catastrophic flaws in restaurant chain's platforms,
--Salesloft Drift hack began last March,
--Customer data stolen in Wealthsimple breach,
--Trump to formally nominate Harman for NSA/Cybercom slot,
--Don't trust XChat's e…

Chinese espionage campaign targeted House staffers ahead of trade talks
Ethical hackers uncover catastrophic flaws in restaurant chain's platforms, Salesloft Drift hack began last March, Customer data stolen in Wealthsimple breach, Trump to formally nominate Harman for NSA/Cybercom slot, Don't trust XChat's encryption, Czech Republic warns of Chinese tech, much more

There’s a fascinating phone scam wave going on that I’ve seen it so far with Apple and now PayPal.
You get an 100% legit looking mail even with valid BIMI headers and everything, telling you about some expensive thing or subscription with a number to call to dispute it.
The main giveaway is that the recipient is always an address in zantigoo.com and not you. 1/2

Strong regulation can nudge automakers to improve customers’ privacy, research suggests https://therecord.media/automakers-data-privacy-ratings-websites-customer-portals

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations
Junjie Chen, Yao Hu, Junjie Li, Kangyue Li, Kun Liu, Wenpeng Li, Xu Li, Ziyuan Li, Feiyu Shen, Xu Tang, Manzhen Wei, Yichen Wu, Fenglong Xie, Kaituo Xu, Kun Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06502

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations
Full-duplex voice interaction allows users and agents to speak simultaneously with controllable barge-in, enabling lifelike assistants and customer service. Existing solutions are either end-to-end, difficult to design and hard to control, or modular pipelines governed by turn-taking controllers that ease upgrades and per-module optimization; however, prior modular frameworks depend on non-open components and external providers, limiting holistic optimization. In this work, we present a complet…

Bango: subscription providers are reducing their reliance on direct acquisition strategies like social media ads due to rising costs and diminishing returns (Daniel Frankel/StreamTV Insider)
https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertisin…

Bango: Subscription providers turn to bundling as direct acquisition marketing falters
Marketers of subscription services including those themed around streaming video and music are cutting back on once reliable direct acquisition strategies, including display and social media advert | A new Bango study concludes that subscription service providers are cutting back on once reliable direct acquisition strategies, including display and social media advertising, for customer growth and are turning to indirect marketing mechanisms like bundling.

Really developing a loathing of corporate no-reply email addresses. Whatever else they do they don't enhance customer service.

»Blogs werden immer mehr zu einer wichtigen Wegstation auf der Customer Journey« titelte der eco im August 2015 ein Interview mit Tim Cole, dem womöglich ersten Blogger des Internets. Anlass war, dass sein Blog cole.de damals 20 Jahre alt wurde.
https://www.eco.d…

The mantra of "If you don't have time to do it right, what makes you think you have time to do it twice?" rings true, it *sounds* right.
But the whole point of agility is to see a third option:
If you don't have time to do it (the complete thing) right, maybe you have time to do part of it right, show the value in that, and then do the next part of it right.
I enjoy doing a good job as much as the next craftsman, but we also can't hold customer outcome…

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
Kai Qin, Kexin Du, Yimeng Chen, Yueyan Liu, Jie Cai, Zhiqiang Nie, Nan Gao, Guohui Wei, Shengzhu Wang, Chun Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00513

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
The integration of various AI tools creates a complex socio-technical environment where employee-customer interactions form the core of work practices. This study investigates how customer service representatives (CSRs) at the power grid service customer service call center perceive AI assistance in their interactions with customers. Through a field visit and semi-structured interviews with 13 CSRs, we found that AI can alleviate some traditional burdens during the call (e.g., typing and memori…

EGC: HaaS Lite WP1 D15 Customer Research - EGC Work Package 1: Deliverable 15: Customer Research, Public Report. - https://www.earth.org.uk/EGC-WP1-D15-Customer-Research.html

EGC: HaaS Lite WP1 D15 Customer Research
EGC Work Package 1: Deliverable 15: Customer Research, Public Report.

Cloning a Conversational Voice AI Agent from Call\,Recording Datasets for Telesales
Krittanon Kaewtawee, Wachiravit Modecrua, Krittin Pachtrachai, Touchapon Kraisingkorn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04871

Cloning a Conversational Voice AI Agent from Call\,Recording Datasets for Telesales
Recent advances in language and speech modelling have made it possible to build autonomous voice assistants that understand and generate human dialogue in real time. These systems are increasingly being deployed in domains such as customer service and healthcare care, where they can automate repetitive tasks, reduce operational costs, and provide constant support around the clock. In this paper, we present a general methodology for cloning a conversational voice AI agent from a corpus of call r…

The vacated rule, meant to go into effect on 14 July, would have covered all forms of negative option marketing
– programs that allow sellers to interpret customer inaction as acceptance of subscriptions,
often leading to unintended charges.
The FTC’s original 1973 rule only covered limited forms of these practices.
It would have also stopped businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chat sessions with agents or creating other barriers to cancellation.
The…

"The #cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business. And when their business needs conflict with your data’s existence, guess which one wins?"
"I wasn’t alone in being targeted by AWS—especially #MENA. Hundreds of Reddit threads, websites, forums, all telling similar stories."
"

Imagine if a candidate for US President had a workable program to ban sludge, that bureaucratic hell companies and the government put us through on support lines, in endless phone menus, and online to make us give up. They'd win 50 states!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”

An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem
Jingyang Zhao, Mingyu Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05471 https://arxiv.org/p…

An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem
The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP), introduced by Golden and Wong in 1981, is an important arc routing problem in Operations Research, which generalizes the famous Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). When every customer has a unit demand, the best known approximation ratio for CARP, given by Jansen in 1993, remains $\frac{5}{2}-\frac{1.5}{k}$, where $k$ denotes the vehicle capacity. Based on recent progress in approximating CVRP, we improve this result by proposing a $(\frac{5}{…

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Jo\~ao B. G. de Brito, Rodrigo Heldt, Cleo S. Silveira, Matthias Bogaert, Guilherme B. Bucco, Fernando B. Luce, Jo\~ao L. Becker, Filipe J. Zabala, Michel J. Anzanello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22711

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Financial institutions increasingly adopt customer-centric strategies to enhance profitability and build long-term relationships. While Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a core metric, its calculations often rely solely on single-entity data, missing insights from customer activities across multiple firms. This study introduces the Potential Customer Lifetime Value (PCLV) framework, leveraging Open Banking (OB) data to estimate customer value comprehensively. We predict retention probability and…

"Thats not to say there haven’t been growing pains. When a great steak comes out of the microwave I get really excited. But more than half the steaks that come out of the microwave get sent back by the customer. To solve this problem I now run ten microwaves in parallel cooking ten steaks. One out of the ten steaks will most likely be good. The number of microwaves has required me to upgrade my restaurant’s electrical system and I now have a small nuclear reactor installed in the parkin…

A Hybrid Mean Field Framework for Aggregators Participating in Wholesale Electricity Markets
Jun He, Andrew L. Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03240 https:/…

A Hybrid Mean Field Framework for Aggregators Participating in Wholesale Electricity Markets
The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop solar and energy storage, is transforming the grid edge, where distributed technologies and customer-side systems increasingly interact with the broader power grid. DER aggregators, entities that coordinate and optimize the actions of many small-scale DERs, play a key role in this transformation. This paper presents a hybrid Mean-Field Control (MFC) and Mean-Field Game (MFG) framework for integrating DER aggregators into…

Did you know that the tickets for the world's most important awards ceremony run through Flownative's servers? 😎
I conducted another interview, this time with long-time customer @… from Passcreator. David talks a bit about what's going on and it's really exciting to see what he and his team have built over the years based on a flow applicati…

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
"On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation".
https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws…

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/
- The Architecture That Should Have Protected Me -
Small reminder that there is no 100% protection in the…

Customer: The system doesn't handle virus infected files well.
Consultant: We'll fix it with a virus cleaning add-on.
How to not do #it #consulting... (And how way too many IT #consultants

You don't want to miss today's extra-packed Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know today, including
--Microsoft enabled Israeli spy agency's mass surveillance of Palestinians' mobile calls,
--Cisco's registered web users disclosed in a likely Salesforce breach-related vishing attack,
--Google confirms customer theft in Salesforce breach-related incident,
--Broadcom chip flaw exposes millions of Dell laptops to attack, …

Microsoft enabled Israeli spy agency's mass surveillance of Palestinians' mobile calls
Cisco's registered web users disclosed in a likely Salesforce breach-related vishing attack, Google confirms customer theft in Salesforce breach-related incident, Broadcom chip flaw exposes millions of Dell laptops to attack, MSFT's Project Ire can ID malware with AI, much more

Cloudflare reports Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $512.3M, vs. $501.21M est., and forecasts Q3 revenue of $543.5M to $544.5M, vs. $538.6M est. (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/31/cloudflare-beats-second-quart…

Cloudflare beats earnings estimates with strong revenue and customer growth - SiliconANGLE
Cloudflare beats earnings estimates with strong revenue and customer growth - SiliconANGLE

Learn to be horrified and offended by customer support that goes nowhere, by inaccessible remedy for problems. Learn to be horrified by the denial of humanity at scale.

Personality as a Probe for LLM Evaluation: Method Trade-offs and Downstream Effects
Gunmay Handa, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama, Philip Treleaven
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04794 …

Personality as a Probe for LLM Evaluation: Method Trade-offs and Downstream Effects
Personality manipulation in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly applied in customer service and agentic scenarios, yet its mechanisms and trade-offs remain unclear. We present a systematic study of personality control using the Big Five traits, comparing in-context learning (ICL), parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and mechanistic steering (MS). Our contributions are fourfold. First, we construct a contrastive dataset with balanced high/low trait responses, enabling effective stee…

"Today, over two and a half million websites have chosen to completely disallow AI training through our managed robots.txt feature or our managed rule blocking AI Crawlers. Every Cloudflare customer is now able to selectively decide which declared AI crawlers are able to access their content in accordance with their business objectives.
We expected a change in bot and crawler behavior based on these new features, and we expect that the techniques bot operators use to evade detecti…

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

Given Artisan Electrics' rep I was expecting this one to come back as firmly their error, but it seems that UK Power Networks have admitted a clerical error and agreed to pay to upgrade a domestic property to 3 phase including all the internal work on the customer's property. Can't be cheap.
https://www.youtube.com/wa…

#PastorArrested for upskirt photos. #oklahoma
Obligatory #NotADragQueen

11 COUNTS: Claremore man accused of targeting woman for peeping tom
An affidavit filed in Tulsa County claims Kendrick Oakley used his cell phone 11 times to try to take a photo of another customer at a store on July 9th.

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.

🤦‍♂️😝

I'm going to make a bold prediction for kinds of future blog post titles you'll see in the next few years:
- I increased production performance 100x by ditching AI Agents
- I reduced my cloud bills 10x by coding algorithmically instead of using AI.
- I improved customer retention after abandoning my chat bot fantasies
Bookmark this post and send me posts from the future please. 🔮

Scoop: Social Security starts customer wait time audit (Stephen Neukam/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/03/social-security-wait-time-audit-senate-democrats-elizabeth-warren-bisignano
http://www.memeorandum.com/250903/p28#a250903p28

Stable formulations for the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences
Concepci\'on Dom\'inguez, Juan de Dios Jaime-Alc\'antara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21944

Stable formulations for the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences
In the Simple Plant Location Problem with Order (SPLPO), the aim is to open a subset of plants to assign every customer taking into account their preferences. Customers rank the plants in strict order and are assigned to their favorite open plant, and the objective is to minimize the location plus allocation costs. Here, we study a generalization of the SPLPO named the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences (CFLCP) where a limited number of customers can be allocated to…

So on to the new house. We decided to collect 3 quotes, so I fired up the Google thingy and looked for HVAC companies in my area. I only looked at companies with 500 reviews with a customer rating of 4.8 or better. The company we ultimately chose had 2,000 reviews with an average of 4.9. Read through the reviews! You learn a lot about their responsiveness and how they deal with problems. If multiple named service people are praised versus 1 individual, then it's likely a cultural thing.

Had a fun conversation on this week's Mac Power Users with @… and @…, ranging from punched card computing in the '70s through developing for NeXT in the '90s to considering how to tastefully use (and avoid overuse) Liquid …

Learning from Majority Label: A Novel Problem in Multi-class Multiple-Instance Learning
Shiku Kaito, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Daiki Suehiro, Ryoma Bise
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04023

Learning from Majority Label: A Novel Problem in Multi-class Multiple-Instance Learning
The paper proposes a novel multi-class Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) problem called Learning from Majority Label (LML). In LML, the majority class of instances in a bag is assigned as the bag-level label. The goal of LML is to train a classification model that estimates the class of each instance using the majority label. This problem is valuable in a variety of applications, including pathology image segmentation, political voting prediction, customer sentiment analysis, and environmental m…

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
Xiangpeng Li, Junwei Ma, Bo Li, Ali Mostafavi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02653

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
The multifaceted nature of disaster impact shows that densely populated areas contribute more to aggregate burden, while sparsely populated but heavily affected regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study introduces a framework for quantifying the societal impacts of power outages by translating customer weighted outage exposure into deprivation measures, integrating welfare metrics with three recovery indicators, average outage days per customer, restoration duration,…

Channel Choice and Customer Value
Shirsho Biswas, Hema Yoganarasimhan, Haonan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00208 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00208

Channel Choice and Customer Value
The rapid growth of digital shopping channels has prompted many traditional retailers to invest in e-commerce websites and mobile apps. While prior literature shows that multichannel customers tend to be more valuable, it overlooks how the reason for adopting a new channel may shape post-adoption behavior. Using transaction-level data from a major Brazilian pet supplies retailer, we examine how adoption of online shopping - by previously offline-only customers - affects post-adoption spend, pro…

Twilio Q2: revenue up 13% YoY to $1.23B, vs. $1.19B est., 349K active customer accounts, and Q3 earnings forecast below est.; TWLO falls 10% after hours (Brandon Evans/Seeking Alpha)
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4481722-twilio-sinks…

Twilio sinks as Q3 earnings forecast comes in weaker than expected
Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) shares sank more than 10% during early post-market trading Thursday after its second quarter fiscal 2025 financial results featured a third quarter earnings per share forecast that was weaker than the market expected.

Customer guidance for SharePoint vulnerability CVE-2025-53770 | MSRC Blog | Microsoft Security Response Center
#sharepoint #cybersecurity #vulnerability
🔗

Toward Low-Latency End-to-End Voice Agents for Telecommunications Using Streaming ASR, Quantized LLMs, and Real-Time TTS
Vignesh Ethiraj, Ashwath David, Sidhanth Menon, Divya Vijay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04721

Toward Low-Latency End-to-End Voice Agents for Telecommunications Using Streaming ASR, Quantized LLMs, and Real-Time TTS
We introduce a low-latency telecom AI voice agent pipeline for real-time, interactive telecommunications use, enabling advanced voice AI for call center automation, intelligent IVR (Interactive Voice Response), and AI-driven customer support. The solution is built for telecom, combining four specialized models by NetoAI: TSLAM, a 4-bit quantized Telecom-Specific Large Language Model (LLM); T-VEC, a Telecom-Specific Embedding Model; TTE, a Telecom-Specific Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) mode…

Have to say, I'm impressed with Wahoo customer service.
Battery cover to my heart rate monitor broke a couple of years ago; I thought they might be able to send me a replacement cover, but after contacting them they sent me a completely new device.
This week the battery in my 4 year old Bolt 2 cycling computer failed and the device will no longer charge. After contacting them, they are now sending me a new Bolt 3 computer as a goodwill gesture.

This person deserves a short story award.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1C7I6NOWE02FM?ASIN=B0CQ8S545V

1/2: Eeek!
https://blog.google/products/chrome/store-reviews/
Just me, or is this a horrifying prospect? The SEO wars and the Amazon homepage have taught us that businesses will do anything - ANYTHING, ethics be damned, to game their online reputations. This …

Chrome is helping you shop smarter and safer with store reviews.
We’re introducing store reviews to Google Chrome in the U.S. to make your online shopping experience safer and more efficient. This feature uses data from Google Shopping and other popular review websites to provide people with helpful insights when shopping on e-commerce sites.Just click the icon to the left of the web address and you can access an AI-generated summary of reviews. The description will cover topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns, helping…

A potential customer may have ghosted me but I just keep working on the project as I get spare time between other projects because it's a fun and challenging one and if they ever reply to me again then yay(?) but if not I'll just drop a new product for others if they want it.

🍐 Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX says $44 million stolen from reserves
#crypto

Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX says $44 million stolen from reserves
The founders of Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX said no customer funds were affected in a more than $40 million theft from reserves.

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Vietnamese Large Language Models in Customer Support
Long S. T. Nguyen, Truong P. Hua, Thanh M. Nguyen, Toan Q. Pham, Nam K. Ngo, An X. Nguyen, Nghi D. M. Pham, Nghia H. Nguyen, Tho T. Quan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22542

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Vietnamese Large Language Models in Customer Support
With the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for Question Answering (QA) systems, improving efficiency and reducing human workload in customer service. The emergence of Vietnamese LLMs (ViLLMs) highlights lightweight open-source models as a practical choice for their accuracy, efficiency, and privacy benefits. However, domain-specific evaluations remain limited, and the absence of benchmark datasets reflecting real customer interactions ma…

Tesla says a Model Y drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to a buyer's home 30 minutes away, marking its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/694801/tesla-autonomous-delivery…

Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer
Tesla delivered its first vehicle autonomously from factory to customer. But

Some of these big retailer breaches have tended to surface in the Korean press first, now it's Papa John's.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-06-26/na…

Papa John's Korea confirms customer data breech exposing names, contact info, addresses
Pizza franchise Papa John's Korea has confirmed a customer data breach caused by a security vulnerability, prompting an official investigation by the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC).

Fast approximation algorithms for the 1-median problem on real-world large graphs
Keisuke Ueta, Wei Wu, Mutsunori Yagiura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03052 https://

Fast approximation algorithms for the 1-median problem on real-world large graphs
The 1-median problem (1MP) on undirected weighted graphs seeks to find a facility location minimizing the total weighted distance to all customer nodes. Although the 1MP can be solved exactly by computing the single-source shortest paths from each customer node, such approaches become computationally expensive on large-scale graphs with millions of nodes. In many real-world applications, such as recommendation systems based on large-scale knowledge graphs, the number of nodes (i.e., potential f…

Cyberattack hits France’s third-largest mobile operator, millions of customers affected https://therecord.media/bouygues-telecom-france-cyberattack-data-breach

Putin has every reason to seek a lifeline for the Russian economy.
In recent weeks, a flurry of signs has shown Russia’s war-drained, sanctions-constrained economy to be at an inflection point.
For the first time since the start of the war, nonmilitary economic activity has been contracting,
bankers are making plans to weather a financial crisis,
and energy firms are worrying about losing their largest customer for seaborne oil exports.

Putin’s Fear of a Humiliating Economic Crisis
Greater sanctions pressure could finally bring Moscow to the negotiating table.

Tel Aviv-based Wonderful, which develops customer support AI agents for businesses in non-English speaking countries, raised a $34M seed led by Index Ventures (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wonderfu…

‘Big Charging’ is concerned about the ‘Durchleitungsmodell’ [‘pass-through’ model], a requirement in the Autobahn truck charging tender. Free choice of supplier for the customer (logistics fleet) means charging at more favourable conditions, new flex models etc.

Google says hackers stole its customers’ data in a breach of its Salesforce database
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/google-says-hackers-stole-its-customers-data-in-a-breach-of-its-salesforce-database/

Google says hackers stole its customers' data by breaching its Salesforce database | TechCrunch
Google confirmed that one of its cloud-stored Salesforce databases was breached, exposing its customer data. Google attributed the breach to a hacking group, ShinyHunters, known for breaking into Salesforce databases.

Service Time Window Design in Last-Mile Delivery
Davod Hosseini, Borzou Rostami, Mojtaba Araghi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01032 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508…

Service Time Window Design in Last-Mile Delivery
Our study focuses on designing reliable service time windows for customers in a last-mile delivery system to boost dependability and enhance customer satisfaction. To construct time windows for a pre-determined route (e.g., provided by commercial routing software), we introduce two criteria that balance window length and the risk of violation. The service provider can allocate different penalties reflecting risk tolerances to each criterion, resulting in various time windows with varying levels…

Sydney-based Lorikeet, which provides AI agents as "customer concierges", raised a AU$54M Series A led by QED Investors at a AU$200M valuation (Paul Smith/Australian Financial Review)
https://www.afr.com/technology/ai-agent-bo

Lorikeet AI: Canva founders invest in Sydney start-up amid rapid growth
The success of Lorikeet’s AI agent technology has attracted investors including Canva founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht.

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Paulo Ricardo Knob, Leonardo Scholler, Juliano Rigatti, Soraia Raupp Musse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02537

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human interactions, the need for emotional intelligence, particularly empathetic listening, becomes increasingly essential. In this study, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond when tasked with generating emotionally rich interactions. Starting from a small dat…

American biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals announced today that it's buying 23andMe,
the bankrupt consumer-genomics company that sold take-home DNA kits.
Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire "substantially all" of 23andMe's assets,
including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.
Put simply, the genetic information of millions is now in the hands of a drugmaker seeking to mine it to make n…

Bankrupt 23andMe Just Sold Off All Your DNA Data
The consumer-genomics company 23andMe just sold its biobank of customer genetic data to drugmaker Regeneron for $256 million.

Source: Sierra, which builds AI customer service agents, nears a $350M raise at a $10B valuation, up from $4.5B in October 2024, and is set to top $100M in ARR (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/03/sierra-ai-agents-funding-350-million

Scoop: Agent startup Sierra closes in on $350 million deal
The company's specialty, AI agents for customer support, is in growing demand.

‘Significant’ amount of customer data accessed during cyberattack on Qantas airline https://therecord.media/qantas-airline-data-breach

“Carefully managing electric vehicle demand could cut all U.S. electric bills by 10% annually, regardless of whether a customer owns an EV, according to new research from Brattle and ev. energy.”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/managed-e

Managed EV charging could generate $30B in annual savings by 2035: report
Carefully managing electric vehicle demand could cut all U.S. electric bills by 10% annually, regardless of whether a customer owns an EV, according to new research from ev.energy and The Brattle Group.

Weak Supervision Techniques towards Enhanced ASR Models in Industry-level CRM Systems
Zhongsheng Wang, Sijie Wang, Jia Wang, Yung-I Liang, Yuxi Zhang, Jiamou Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16843

Weak Supervision Techniques towards Enhanced ASR Models in Industry-level CRM Systems
In the design of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, accurately identifying customer types and offering personalized services are key to enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, this process faces the challenge of discerning customer voices and intentions, and general pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) models make it difficult to effectively address industry-specific speech recognition tasks. To address this issue, we innovatively proposed a solution for fin…

Israeli customer service automation company Nice acquires Cognigy, which develops a conversational and agentic AI platform, for $955M, set to close in Q4 2025 (Shiri Habib-Valdhorn/Globes)
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-nice-acquires-ai-co-cognigy-…

Nice acquires AI co Cognigy for $955m
The acquisition combines Nice's purpose built customer service AI platform with Cognigy's conversational and agentic platform, which will enable organizations to accelerate AI adoption in customer experience.

Arabic Chatbot Technologies in Education: An Overview
Hicham Bourhil, Yacine El Younoussi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04066…

Arabic Chatbot Technologies in Education: An Overview
The recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, and in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular, and some of its applications such as chatbots, have led to their implementation in different domains like education, healthcare, tourism, and customer service. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing interest in these digital technologies to allow and enhance remote access. In education, e-learning systems have been massively adopted worldwide. The emerge…

SaaS giant Workiva discloses data breach after Salesforce attack
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/saas-giant-workiva-discloses-data-breach-after-salesforce-attack/?mid=1#cid=3061643

SaaS giant Workiva discloses data breach after Salesforce attack
Workiva, a leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, notified its customers that attackers who gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system stole some of their data.

Scale AI emphasizes that it remains an independent company and says Meta will not have access to Scale's internal systems or customers' confidential information (Scale AI)
https://scale.com/blog/customer-trust-scale-meta-deal

Scale Remains Independent After Meta Investment | Scale
Customer trust and data security remain Scale’s top priorities.

Amazon's Project Kuiper signs up JetBlue as its first airline customer to use its satellite internet for in-flight Wi-Fi in a quarter of the fleet from 2027 (Micah Maidenberg/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj…

Data breach reveals Catwatchful ‘stalkerware’ is spying on thousands of phones
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/data-breach-reveals-catwatchful-stalkerware-spying-on-thousands-android-phones/

Exclusive: Data breach reveals Catwatchful 'stalkerware' is spying on thousands of phones
The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

Bret Taylor's Sierra raised $350M at a $10B valuation, up from $4.5B in 2024, and says its AI customer service agents are being used by "hundreds of millions" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/bret-taylor-sierra-ai-startup…

Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's Sierra is the latest $10 billion AI startup
Bret Taylor's artificial intelligence startup Sierra has closed a $350 million funding round

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-qantas-confirms-cyber-incident-one-its-contact-centres-2025-07-01/
Australia's Qantas says 6 million customer accounts accessed in cyber hack

Cloudflare says attackers gained access to a Salesforce instance it uses for internal customer case management, as part of the Salesloft Drift breach (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

French payments group Worldline's stock drops 20% after European journalism network EIC reports alleging that the company covered up customer fraud (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Cinven acquires a majority stake in Smart Communications from Accel-KKR; sources: the deal values the customer conversations platform at ~$1.8B including debt (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/cinven…

Decagon, which offers AI-powered customer service agents for enterprises, raised a $131M Series C co-led by Accel and a16z at a $1.5B valuation (Anna Tong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/customer-service-ai-startup-…

Sources: Salesforce and ServiceNow are in talks to invest ~$750M each in Genesys, which uses AI to automate customer service functions, valuing Genesys at ~$15B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-31/salesforc…

Figma's stock closes up 250% at $115.50, after Figma sold shares at $33 in its IPO, hitting a ~$68B valuation; Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition fell apart in 2023 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/31/figma-fig-starts-trading-on-nyse-after-…

Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33
Fast-growing Figma's internet software has over 13 million users, and the customer list includes Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

Figma opens at $85 on the NYSE, after selling shares at $33 in its IPO, hitting a ~$50B valuation, more than a year after Adobe's $20B failed acquisition (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/31/figma-fig-starts-trading-on-nyse-after-ipo.html

Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33
Fast-growing Figma's internet software has over 13 million users, and the customer list includes Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

Source: Pylon, which uses AI to automate B2B customer service, raised $31M led by a16z and Bain Capital at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/andreessen-…

Why Andreessen and Bain Backed a Self-Described ‘Zendesk Killer’
Automating customer service has been among the most popular applications of artificial intelligence models, and investors have pumped about $1 billion into six key startups developing them. Now, a seventh is throwing its hat into the ring.San Francisco-based startup Pylon has raised $31 million ...

Sources: Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans to cut ties with the company after the Meta deal; Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI also plan to step back (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-scal…

Marc Benioff says "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now", including software engineering and customer service (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-26/salesforce-ceo-s…

Chrome will debut AI-generated store reviews to US shoppers, where clicking an icon just to the left of the URL will show a popup with store reputation info (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/google-chrome-adds-ai-…

Google Chrome adds AI-powered store summaries to help US shoppers | TechCrunch
The feature will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store's reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

Sources: mass production of Microsoft's next AI chip is delayed to 2026 and is expected to underperform Nvidia's Blackwell chip, released in late 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-chip-effort-falls-b…

Microsoft’s AI Chip Effort Falls Behind
Microsoft has spent years designing its own artificial intelligence chips, in part to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. It isn’t going so well. The software giant, which Nvidia employees say was its largest customer by revenue last year, is taking much longer than expected to design its ...