Tag with "PrivacyTech"

DuckDuckGo has rolled out a new voice chat feature for its Duck.ai platform that puts privacy front and center. Unlike other voice assistants, this one promises not to store your audio or use it for AI training. Users can chat freely through encrypted channels without creating an account, with OpenAI providing the brains behind the scenes while being contractually barred from keeping any data.

The open-source AI assistant formerly known as Clawd has undergone its third rebranding, settling on OpenClaw after trademark hurdles and community feedback. Despite the naming drama, the project has exploded in popularity, surpassing 100,000 GitHub stars while maintaining its quirky lobster mascot. Offering local AI processing across multiple platforms, OpenClaw lets users manage emails, calendars and more while keeping all data private.

Xiaomi has unveiled Miloco, its new AI-powered smart home system that understands natural language commands. Unlike traditional setups requiring specific instructions, Miloco lets you simply say what you want - like 'turn on the lamp and play relaxing music.' The system processes everything locally for privacy and works across different smart home brands. It's powered by Xiaomi's own MiMo-VL-Miloco-7B model that combines voice and visual understanding.

Mozilla has integrated Perplexity's AI search engine into Firefox, offering users optional conversational search capabilities. Unlike competitors embedding proprietary AI, Firefox emphasizes flexibility and privacy by allowing global desktop users to enable or disable the feature. The update accompanies new profile customization tools and ongoing Google Lens integration tests.

Apple's FastVLM visual language model is now publicly available, offering 85x faster video captioning while keeping all data on-device. The lightweight 500M parameter version runs directly in browsers on Apple Silicon Macs, with more powerful variants available for advanced users.

HTC has launched the ultra-light VIVE Eagle AI glasses, weighing just 49 grams, to compete with Meta's smart glasses. Priced at $520, the device features local data processing for privacy, a 12MP camera, and supports OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini AI. Available in Taiwan, it targets privacy-conscious consumers amid growing concerns over Meta's data policies.

Apple announced it will use blurred images from its Maps "Look Around" feature to train AI models for image recognition and enhancement, starting March 2025, while maintaining privacy protections.