A new AI listens to every prison call and decides who is speaking

A Texas company has begun selling corrections agencies an artificial intelligence system that listens to prison phone calls. It works out who is speaking, whether or not the speaker wants that. LEO Te [...]

BYD rejects claims it violated Hungary’s environmental rules at its Szeged EV factory

BYD executive vice president Stella Li said the Chinese automaker has complied with all environmental regulations at its Szeged factory in Hungary, pushing back against allegations that the company vi [...]

17 fusion startups have now raised over $100M each, and the total keeps climbing

The number of fusion startups that have raised more than $100 million has reached 17, according to a TechCrunch tally published Thursday, with total private investment in the sector now exceeding $13 [...]

France just put another €13bn into the funding model the rest of Europe wants to copy

France has found another €13bn for its tech sector. And it barely cost the state a thing. The money comes through Tibi, a programme that nudges French insurers and pension funds to back venture and [...]

Mastercard took down payments across Australia with a scheduled update

Mastercard transactions were declined across Australia on Saturday afternoon after what the company describes as a scheduled system update, with more than 1,900 outage reports logged by mid-afternoon. [...]

Avec’s latest AI feature reads your email so you don’t miss the due date

Avec has added a feature that scans an email for a deadline when you swipe left, then resurfaces the message on the relevant day. The $8.4mn startup has published no detail on where that scanning happ [...]

Europe frets over American AI as the tech world descends on France

The timing was almost too neat. Days before more than 180,000 people were due to file into VivaTech in Paris, and before G7 leaders sat down at the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains, the United State [...]

Instagram wants to make algorithm customisation a core part of the app, not a buried setting

Instagram head Adam Mosseri previewed new ways to surface Your Algorithm, the feature that lets users specify which topics they want to see more or less of. In an Instagram post this week, Mosseri sai [...]

UK regulator proposes letting developers steer users off Apple and Google payments

Britain’s competition regulator has decided that the cheapest place to buy a digital subscription should not be the one place an app is forbidden from mentioning. On Tuesday the Competition and Mark [...]