voice-assistant
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Merlyn Mind gives teachers the room back
An AI assistant that changes slides, finds answers and lets teachers keep moving. Merlyn Mind’s wager is that classroom technology should follow the teacher around.
ChatGPT Ate the Blank Page
The chatbot that made prompting a household verb now wants to search, draw, speak, study, code, and finish the errand. Here is how to use its sprawling toolbox without handing it your judgment.
The Orange Box That Bet the Smartphone Was Optional
A $199 orange gadget promised to replace your apps with an AI that clicks the buttons for you. The launch went viral, the reviews went brutal, and rabbit is still shipping.
The $50 Banana That Outlived Its Own Punchline
It began as a joke on a Buffalo desk - a guy holding a banana to his ear so nobody would bug him. Six years and $1.6 million in sales later, the joke has a battery, a Bluetooth chip, and a cause.
JetBuy
JetBuy is a voice-first ordering app that lets people reorder their usual food for delivery or pickup in about a second by speaking a saved command to Siri. After a one-time setup that ties phrases like "dinner," "coffee," or "sushi" to a specific order, a user just says "Hey Siri, JetBuy Dinner" and the order is placed - replacing the roughly 20 taps a typical delivery app takes with zero. Founded by Ryan Holmes and built around the insight that most people order the same handful of things over and over, JetBuy launched on the App Store in 2024 and demoed at Y Combinator's 2025 Demo Day.
PolyAI
PolyAI builds enterprise voice assistants that answer customer calls and handle them end-to-end. The London- and San Francisco-based company spun out of Cambridge's dialogue systems lab in 2017, and now runs AI agents in 18 languages for brands like Marriott, Caesars, PG&E, FedEx and Hopper.