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Jon Keegan

Call your mother. Or just let AI do it for you.

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, a grim new market has emerged among the flurry of AI apps promising to help you with all the tasks in your busy life.

Like calling your elderly parents.

404 Media tried out the service from AI startup inTouch, whose website says:

“Busy life? You can’t call your parent every day — but we can.”

Users have some controls to customize the calls, and can tweak notifications and get summaries of calls. For $29.95 per month, a bland AI bot with all the charm of an insurance company customer service agent will call up your lonely mom, dad, grandparent, or “relative with dementia” and engage in some small talk about the weather, or whatever the receiver of the call wants to talk about.

Including your mom asking why her adult child won’t pick up the phone to call her.

“Busy life? You can’t call your parent every day — but we can.”

Users have some controls to customize the calls, and can tweak notifications and get summaries of calls. For $29.95 per month, a bland AI bot with all the charm of an insurance company customer service agent will call up your lonely mom, dad, grandparent, or “relative with dementia” and engage in some small talk about the weather, or whatever the receiver of the call wants to talk about.

Including your mom asking why her adult child won’t pick up the phone to call her.

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Google uses an AI-generated ad to sell AI search

Google is using AI video to tell consumers about its AI search tools, with a Veo 3-generated advertisement that will begin airing on TV today. In it, a cartoonish turkey uses Google’s AI Mode to plan a vacation from its farm before it’s eaten for Thanksgiving.

Like other AI ad campaigns that have opted to depict yetis or famous artworks rather than humans, Google chose a turkey as its protagonist to avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that happens when AI is used to generate human likenesses.

Google’s in-house marketing group, Google Creative Lab, developed the idea for the ad — not Google’s AI — but chose not to prominently label the ad as AI, telling The Wall Street Journal that consumers don’t actually care how the ad was made.

Google’s in-house marketing group, Google Creative Lab, developed the idea for the ad — not Google’s AI — but chose not to prominently label the ad as AI, telling The Wall Street Journal that consumers don’t actually care how the ad was made.

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Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent nearly $100 billion on capex last quarter

The numbers are in and tech giants Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft spent a whopping $97 billion last quarter on purchases of property and equipment. That’s nearly double what it was a year earlier as AI infrastructure costs continue to balloon and show no sign of stopping. Amazon, which reported earnings and capital expenditure spending that beat analysts’ expectations yesterday, continued to lead the pack, spending more than $35 billion on capex in the quarter that ended in September.

Note that the data we’re using here is from FactSet, which strips out finance leases when calculating capital expenditures. If those expenses were included the total would be well over $100 billion last quarter.

Apple Store in China

Apple reports Q4 earnings and revenue slightly above Wall Street estimates

The iPhone maker reported its FY 25 fourth-quarter earnings Thursday.

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