embodied ai

Thousands of human runners are not the only ones preparing for Beijing’s spring racing season. On April 19, 2026, more than 100 humanoid robot teams are expected to line up for a half-marathon in Beijing’s E-Town district, turning a novelty event into a serious stress test for embodied AI...

Napster’s newest hardware — Napster Station — promises to drive conversational AI out of browser tabs and into the busiest public spaces, claiming to solve the long-standing problem of voice assistants in noisy, crowded environments with a purpose-built kiosk that combines a bespoke microphone...

Napster’s new Napster Station promises to move conversational AI off screens and into crowded, noisy public spaces with a purpose-built kiosk that the company says can deliver persistent, video-enabled concierge service where ordinary voice assistants struggle. Background / Overview Napster —...

Google DeepMind’s latest research preview, SIMA 2, has taken one of the most explicit paths from “game-playing bot” toward a generalist, embodied agent by training on commercial 3D games such as Goat Simulator 3 and No Man’s Sky and by embedding Google’s Gemini reasoning models to let the agent...

Scientists from major research centres have issued a stark warning: current large language models (LLMs) driving AI-powered robots are not yet safe for unsupervised use in homes, care settings, or other spaces where physical harm and discrimination can occur. The peer‑reviewed study published in...

A new peer‑reviewed paper concludes that current large language models (LLMs) driving robots are not safe for general-purpose, real‑world deployment — because when given access to people’s personal data these LLM‑driven systems routinely produce discriminatory, violent, or unlawful...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot refresh puts a deliberately playful face on Windows 11 AI: an animated avatar called Mico that appears in Copilot’s voice mode, changes color and shape to signal listening or thinking, and is explicitly designed as an optional, friendlier way to make voice-first...

Google DeepMind’s latest robotics announcement marks a decisive push to move large multimodal models from the screen into the world of flesh-and-metal—introducing Gemini Robotics 1.5 and Gemini Robotics‑ER 1.5, two complementary models that split the job of thinking and acting to give robots...

Napster’s announcement that it is among the first commercial deployers of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry’s Realtime API marks a notable moment in the maturation of production-grade, low-latency voice and video AI agents for commerce and customer experience. The collaboration—announced September 25...

The rise of anthropomorphized artificial intelligence has finally reached a new milestone: Microsoft has given its flagship Copilot AI a literal face. Once confined to the sterile world of text and, more recently, to faceless voicebots, we are now in an era where interacting with AI means...

Microsoft's Copilot, the AI-powered assistant that has taken center stage in the company’s software ecosystem, may soon look a lot more, well, human. Recent revelations, discussed extensively across sources such as Laptop Mag and TestingCatalog, indicate that Microsoft is quietly developing a...

Microsoft’s generative AI journey continues to accelerate, and the recent experimental appearance of the “Live Portraits” feature in Copilot’s web interface is a compelling new chapter in that evolution. For anyone closely watching the transformation of AI assistants from text-based bots to...

In a move that sounds like it came straight out of a sci-fi blockbuster, Meta Platforms is shifting gears—from social networks to a futuristic robotics playground. The tech giant announced plans to invest in AI-powered humanoid robots designed to tackle everyday physical tasks, marking an...