Another Crazy Day in AI 6/104

Another Crazy Day in AI: New Voice AI Suite Handles Calls Start to Finish

Nov 3
4 min read

Hello, AI Enthusiasts.

If you spent the weekend unplugged, AI made sure to keep things interesting.

RingCentral just introduced a trio of talkative tools — AIR, AVA, and ACE — to handle your calls, assist your chats, and analyze your conversations before you’ve even hung up.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s putting brains at the edge with a new platform that processes data right where it’s created. Speed, security, and smarts, all packed into one sleek system.

And Facebook’s latest AI feature? It’s turning forgotten photos into fresh collages, giving your camera roll a second life (and maybe a little chaos).

Week’s barely started, but AI’s already on overdrive.

Here's another crazy day in AI:

RingCentral launches three-part agentic voice suite
Cisco builds the backbone for real-world AI performance
Facebook adds creative AI edits for photos and memories
Some AI tools to try out

TODAY'S FEATURED ITEM: Complete Voice AI Suite from RingCentral

A robotic scientist in a classic white coat with 'AI Scientist' on its back stands beside a human scientist with 'Human Scientist' on their coat, looking towards the AI Scientist.

Image Credit: Wowza (created with Ideogram)

How much revenue is your business losing from missed calls and forgotten follow-ups?

RingCentral just announced a three-part voice AI suite that tackles customer interactions from start to finish. The company, which has been building communication systems for over twenty years, released details on Business Wire about AIR (AI Receptionist), AVA (AI Virtual Assistant), and ACE (AI Conversation Expert). These tools work together to handle calls when you're unavailable, assist during live conversations, and pull insights from past interactions. The announcement positions RingCentral as a major player in the growing market for business communication AI, backed by what they say is hundreds of millions in annual research and development spending.

What each tool does:

AIR answers calls any time of day, booking appointments and capturing lead information even when your team is busy or closed—it saves details directly into Salesforce or HubSpot, hands off calls to your staff with full conversation context so customers don't repeat themselves, handles scheduling across multiple calendars, and plugs into whatever SIP-based phone system you're already using
AVA helps during live interactions, creating summaries and action items while calls and meetings are happening, drafting and translating messages in different languages, adjusting its suggestions based on what you're doing at the moment, and walking users through features they might not have discovered yet
ACE analyzes past conversations for patterns, with an Insights module that explains data in plain language, digs into why certain issues keep appearing with concrete examples and recommendations, and lets managers ask questions conversationally instead of building reports manually
Televero Health, a behavioral healthcare provider, saw appointments increase 14% and revenue jump by over $200,000 monthly in the first four months using AIR, while Echo Global Logistics noted they now have business intelligence instead of just call records
AIR is live in the US, UK, and Canada, AVA is in limited early access for US customers, and ACE's complete Insights module should be widely available by early 2026

Most businesses already know they're losing valuable information during customer calls. Someone forgets to update the CRM, important details get lost when transferring calls, or patterns in customer feedback go unnoticed because nobody has time to review hundreds of conversations. The promise of tools like these is straightforward—capture what's currently slipping through the cracks. But here's what press releases don't tell you: human conversations are unpredictable. Customers call when they're upset, explain things poorly, or need help with situations that don't fit neat categories. An AI that breezes through simple appointment requests might completely fumble when things get complicated.

The real question isn't whether the technology sounds impressive, but whether it works when your actual customers call. Early results from healthcare and logistics companies look promising, but those are controlled environments with support teams helping them along. What happens when AIR encounters a thick accent or industry-specific terms it wasn't trained on? Does AVA's real-time assistance actually help, or does it just add another distraction during important calls? Can ACE find insights that aren't already obvious to anyone paying attention? These aren't questions you can answer from a feature list. They only become clear when the system is handling your specific customers, in your particular industry, dealing with the quirks and complications that make your business different from everyone else's.

Read the full article here.

OTHER INTERESTING AI HIGHLIGHTS:

Cisco Builds the Backbone for Real-World AI Performance

/Cisco Newsroom

Cisco has introduced Unified Edge, a new AI platform built to handle distributed and agentic workloads where data is created and processed. The system combines compute, networking, and storage in one modular platform that simplifies deployment and scaling while keeping security front and center. It is designed for industries like retail, healthcare, and manufacturing that depend on real-time AI insights. With Unified Edge, Cisco is moving AI infrastructure closer to the edge to make it faster, smarter, and more efficient.

Read more here.

Facebook Adds Creative AI Edits for Photos and Memories

/Meta – Facebook Newsroom

Facebook has introduced a new AI feature that suggests photos and videos from users’ camera rolls and turns them into creative collages and edits. The feature is opt-in and fully private, allowing users to decide what to share and with whom. It helps people rediscover meaningful moments that often get buried among everyday photos. The feature is now available in the US and Canada, with plans to expand to more regions soon.

Read more here.

SOME AI TOOLS TO TRY OUT:

Replymer – Generates human-like replies that naturally promote your product.
Sidemail – All-in-one EU-based email platform for startups with GDPR built in.
Pomelli – Google’s AI tool for instantly creating on-brand marketing content.

That’s a wrap on today’s Almost Daily craziness.

Catch us almost every day—almost! 😉

EXCITING NEWS:

The Another Crazy Day in AI newsletter is on LinkedIn!!!

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Content: As part of our commitment to exploring new technologies, we used AI to help curate and refine our newsletters. This enriches our content and keeps us at the forefront of digital innovation, ensuring you stay informed with the latest trends and developments.

Another Crazy Day in AI: The End of Traditional SEO as We Know It

Oct 30
4 min read

Hello, AI Enthusiasts.

It’s that time of week when your brain says “weekend,” but your inbox insists otherwise.

A seasoned entrepreneur talks about the rise of Generative Engine Optimization — a call for content that prioritizes credibility over clickbait as search evolves beyond the traditional keyword game.

Then there’s an AI creative who argues that while machines can process, only people can perceive... and that’s what keeps us essential.

Meanwhile, Google’s latest upgrades to NotebookLM make it less of a note-taker and more of a thought partner.

Weekend mode loading… but the stories don’t stop.

Here's another crazy day in AI:

Generative search and the future of content strategy
Why AI won’t outgrow humanity
NotebookLM gets smarter with goal-based chat
Some AI tools to try out

TODAY'S FEATURED ITEM: The Changing Rules of Online Visibility

Image Credit: Wowza (created with Ideogram)

Are you creating content for people to find, or for machines to recommend?

Bryan Cheung, co-founder and CMO of Liferay, discusses how search visibility is changing as generative tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude influence how people find and evaluate information. He describes a growing need for content that reflects genuine expertise, credible sources, and clear structure—qualities that help both human readers and language models recognize value.

Cheung refers to this new landscape as Generative Engine Optimization, an approach that moves beyond keywords and focuses on clarity, context, and trust. Drawing insights from CMSWire’s Dom Nicastro and VML’s Luis Fernandez, he highlights how brands can adapt to environments where AI systems curate and summarize content instead of just listing search results.

Points worth noting from the discussion:

Real questions guide discovery. Focusing on the questions audiences actually ask helps align content with how people search and how AI tools process intent.
Structure strengthens visibility. Clean formatting, clear headings, and organized metadata make information easier for both humans and AI systems to interpret.
Authentic expertise earns credibility. Content created by identifiable professionals with real-world experience signals authority and reliability.
Supporting data enhances trust. Referencing studies, surveys, or direct evidence provides verifiable context and reinforces informational depth.
Readable formats help comprehension. Bullet points and short paragraphs make complex ideas easier to follow and improve machine understanding.
Multimodal elements expand context. Pairing text with labeled visuals or videos offers richer insights and supports visibility in visual or generative search.
New metrics are emerging. Mentions within AI-generated summaries or chat responses are becoming new indicators of relevance and brand awareness.

An infographic illustrating the key pillars of AI-ready content—question-based strategy, structural clarity, strong metadata, and list formatting—designed to enhance discoverability in generative search environments. | Simpler Media Group

More people are using AI tools as their first stop for information, and that changes how content gets found and evaluated. Cheung's observations about structure, expertise, and authenticity reflect patterns others in the field are noticing too. There's no blueprint yet for how this all plays out—AI systems are still developing, and different platforms handle content differently. But thinking about how these tools assess credibility and usefulness seems like a reasonable place to start, especially when those same qualities also serve human readers well.

Cheung isn't suggesting you abandon everything you know about creating content or chase after algorithmic tricks that might stop working next month. He's pointing out that certain fundamentals—clear writing, verifiable expertise, logical organization—may matter even more now that AI systems are part of how people discover content. Whether you're writing for a search engine, an AI tool, or a person reading directly, those elements tend to hold up.

This walks through several questions worth sitting with. How do you make expertise visible and verifiable? What does good structure look like when both humans and machines need to parse your information? And as AI tools continue to grow in influence, how do you create work that remains useful and discoverable across different platforms? The answers may still be taking shape, but asking the right questions feels like a reasonable starting point.

Read the full article here.

OTHER INTERESTING AI HIGHLIGHTS:

Why AI Won’t Outgrow Humanity

/Andrew Mayne, Artificial Intelligence Creative, Educator, and WSJ Bestselling Author

Andrew Mayne, an AI creative and former OpenAI technologist, argues that fears of AI replacing humans miss the bigger picture. While automation will excel at cognitive and physical tasks, it cannot replicate human networks of trust, empathy, and relevance — the very foundations of culture and economy. Rather than displacing people, Mayne sees AI as a force that amplifies human potential, enabling more meaningful work and creativity if societies focus on adaptation over resistance. The future, he says, belongs not to machines alone, but to humans who learn to work with them.

Read more here.

NotebookLM Gets Smarter with Goal-Based Chat

/Anuja Agrawal, Senior Staff Lead, NotebookLM, on Google Blogs – The Keyword

Google has rolled out major upgrades to NotebookLM, making it a smarter and more goal-driven AI research assistant. The update expands context windows to one million tokens, increases conversation memory sixfold, and improves response quality by 50%. Users can now personalize chats with specific goals, voices, or roles — turning NotebookLM into anything from a research advisor to a creative strategist. With these enhancements powered by Gemini models, NotebookLM evolves from a note-taking companion into a powerful, adaptive research partner.

Read more here.

SOME AI TOOLS TO TRY OUT:

Logic – Automates recurring decisions by thinking the way you do.
Dreamlit – Creates branded automated emails from plain English prompts.
Gladly – Delivers AI-powered customer service that feels human.

That’s a wrap on today’s Almost Daily craziness.

Catch us almost every day—almost! 😉

EXCITING NEWS:

The Another Crazy Day in AI newsletter is on LinkedIn!!!

Another Crazy Day in AI: Teaching With and Through Technology

Oct 29
5 min read

Hello, AI Enthusiasts.

Midweek check-in: how’s your pace?

In a recent podcast, Inside Higher Ed’s Ashley Mowreader speaks with Touro University’s Shlomo Argamon about what happens when universities lead with curiosity instead of fear when adopting AI. Their approach is simple: teach, test, and grow together.

Meanwhile, Google’s teaming up with Internet2 to help universities navigate that same journey responsibly through its AI Education Leadership Program.

And while educators explore how AI can teach, Adobe’s proving how AI can inspire. Their sweeping creative updates take it full circle, blending art, design, and intelligence into one seamless experience.

Still plenty of week left to make something new.

Here's another crazy day in AI:

The experimentation approach to AI in higher ed
Google teams up with Internet2 to advance AI in higher ed
Adobe showcases AI innovations across its creative suite
Some AI tools to try out

TODAY'S FEATURED ITEM: Faculty Experimentation and Student Practice

Image Credit: Wowza (created with Ideogram)

Can universities prepare students for an AI-driven workplace without losing what makes education fundamentally human?

In a recent episode of Voices of Student Success, Ashley Mowreader, reporter and podcast host at Inside Higher Ed, talks with Shlomo Argamon, Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence at Touro University. Their conversation offers a grounded look at how one university is approaching the integration of AI into teaching and learning—not through sweeping mandates, but through curiosity, experimentation, and professional growth.

Touro University’s approach reflects a wider trend across higher education: finding responsible and meaningful ways to include AI in the classroom. Argamon describes how the institution is developing policies, faculty programs, and learning tools that help students and educators understand both the potential and the limits of these technologies.

What the discussion brings to light:

Ongoing faculty support – The university provides office hours, training sessions, and resources to help instructors navigate new teaching methods, acknowledging this creates additional work on top of existing responsibilities
AI woven into existing courses – General education includes discipline-specific modules where students learn to use these tools for writing, historical research, clinical practice, and other applications relevant to what they're already studying
Funded teaching experiments – Almost 100 faculty members received grants to test different methods of incorporating AI into instruction, with plans to share outcomes whether the experiments work as hoped or not
Flexibility within structure – The institutional policy establishes baseline expectations while giving individual schools, departments, and instructors authority to set their own classroom-specific guidelines
More practice opportunities – Students use AI-powered mannequins for medical training, receive automated feedback on presentations, and access simulations that let them practice skills outside regular class hours
Visibility into learning processes – Some tools show instructors the full development of student work, revealing which sections were drafted first, what got revised, and where students got stuck
Recognition of complications – The conversation addresses concerns about simulations becoming too game-like, maintaining genuine human interaction, and ensuring technology-mediated learning still develops empathy
Acceptance of uncertainty – The university treats AI integration as something that requires ongoing experimentation rather than presenting itself as having definitive answers

This conversation happens as many institutions grapple with similar questions. Recent data shows nearly 30 percent of college provosts have reviewed curriculum to address AI in professional settings, with another 63 percent planning to do so. But the distance between planning and doing is significant. How do you train faculty who already have full schedules? What does meaningful AI literacy look like in practice? When does a tool that's supposed to help students learn end up doing the learning for them?

Argamon doesn't pretend these questions have simple answers, which makes the conversation more useful than it would be otherwise. His description of Touro's work suggests an institution that's comfortable admitting it's figuring things out as it goes. The emphasis on letting faculty develop their own approaches recognizes that what works in a business course probably won't work the same way in a nursing program. The innovation grants acknowledge that some experiments won't pan out, and that's okay because the information gained from what doesn't work matters too. The university's baseline policy sounds clear—students can use AI to assist with work but not to complete it—until you start thinking about specific situations where that distinction becomes harder to draw.

The conversation also brings up tensions that probably won't resolve themselves quickly or cleanly. Argamon mentions the value of students practicing on each other, where future healthcare workers or social workers learn empathy by experiencing both sides of a professional interaction. A simulation can't replicate that completely, no matter how advanced it gets. He talks about instructors suddenly having access to enormous amounts of data about student behavior and not necessarily knowing what's useful versus what's just noise. He raises the concern that AI could end up interacting with AI—students using it to produce assignments, teachers using it to evaluate them—while the human connection that's supposed to be at the center of education gets squeezed out. These aren't problems with obvious solutions waiting to be implemented. They're ongoing challenges that will need continued attention as the technology develops and as institutions learn more about what actually happens when these tools move from theory into daily classroom use.

Read the full article here.

Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts here.

Listen on Spotify here.

OTHER INTERESTING AI HIGHLIGHTS:

Google Teams Up with Internet2 to Advance AI in Higher Ed

/Google Blogs – The Keyword

Google has partnered with Internet2 to launch the AI Education Leadership Program (ELP), a nationwide initiative designed to help universities responsibly adopt AI in research, teaching, and learning. The program provides a shared framework for institutions to integrate tools like Gemini for Education and NotebookLM while building a community-driven approach to governance and implementation. Ten leading universities across the U.S. — including UC Berkeley, NYU, and the University of Washington — are joining the inaugural cohort. Together, they’ll help shape how AI enhances learning and innovation in higher education.

Read more here.

Adobe Showcases AI Innovations Across Its Creative Suite

/Adobe Newsroom

At this year’s Adobe MAX 2025, Adobe unveiled a sweeping set of AI-powered updates across Firefly, Creative Cloud, Express, and GenStudio—introducing what it calls “AI for every creator.” New AI assistants and conversational tools now let users generate and refine content simply by describing what they envision, while the Firefly Image Model 5 and new partner integrations with Google, OpenAI, and Runway expand creative flexibility. Adobe’s latest innovations aim to redefine the creative process, blending human imagination with intelligent, customizable tools for design, audio, and video production.

Read more here.

SOME AI TOOLS TO TRY OUT:

Gobii – Automate web workflows with always-on AI agents for research, ops, and intelligence.
ConductorOne – Secure and automate access for all users and AI agents from one platform.
FlowithOS – Next-gen AI OS that plans, evolves, and executes with memory and speed.

That’s a wrap on today’s Almost Daily craziness.

Catch us almost every day—almost! 😉

EXCITING NEWS:

The Another Crazy Day in AI newsletter is on LinkedIn!!!