Qazaq Culture and Voice Engine: Important IT News from the Past Week

New audio tool that can read text and imitate voices from OpenAI

Voice Engine can generate speech that sounds like the speech of individual people, with their specific frequency and intonations. All the software needs is 15 seconds of a person's voice recording to recreate their voice.

Cadillac is preparing a "very American luxury SUV"

The car will be presented in April, possibly at the end of the month at the Beijing Auto Show, but the company has revealed some details in a series of teasers. For instance, the vehicle will come with a lifetime warranty. The car will feature electric umbrellas, double-layered glass, and a 9K resolution Mini LED screen.

A unique Qazaq Culture project has been launched in Kazakhstan

The heart of the website will be a news blog covering all cultural news from the country and the world. The project features vibrant festivals, fairs, competitions, as well as premieres of theatrical productions, domestic films, book presentations by famous and emerging writers, art exhibitions, anniversary celebrations, and regional projects of various scales.

Telegram channel authors can now receive 50% of ad revenue

Now, owners of public channels with 1,000 or more subscribers can receive 50% of the revenue from ads displayed in their channel as a reward.
Rewards from the monetization program can be withdrawn without commission or used to pay for ad placements in Telegram, collectible addresses, or Premium subscription giveaways.

Foreign IT companies are opening their representative offices in the Tashkent region

During negotiations with Zhuang Zhiyang, director of the Chinese company CJ Technology, an agreement was reached to open a branch of the company in the Tashkent region. It is expected that by the end of 2024, the company will create more than 50 jobs in Uzbekistan and provide outsourcing services to the global market.

Google created an AI for fact-checking answers from other AIs

LLMs are used for various purposes, including writing scientific papers, but they often make mistakes, providing unreliable information and even insisting on its truthfulness. The new development from the Google DeepMind team extracts individual facts from the neural network's output, formulates a query to a search engine, and attempts to find confirmation for the stated information.

Stanford published a study on the development of artificial intelligence in Tajikistan

The thematic study reveals the history of the AI industry's formation in Tajikistan through the lens of three organizations that laid the foundation for AI: the fintech startup zypl.ai, the AI Council, and the public organization tajrupt.

A chatbot for government services has been launched in test mode in Kyrgyzstan for citizen convenience

The advantage of the chatbot is language selection and 24/7 availability for communication, ensuring uninterrupted support and real-time answers to questions. In its first month of operation, @infocom_kg_bot processed over 1,000 dialogues, indicating its active use by citizens.

CITIX will raise $20 million to expand its business abroad

The Kazakh urban infrastructure and advertising placement company CITIX raised $20 million on the Astana International Exchange through the placement of two-year dollar bonds with an annual yield of 11%. The bonds were placed by the brokerage company Freedom Finance Global.

Kazakh startup CerebraAI is moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley

CerebraAI has moved its headquarters from Kazakhstan to the United States. They have joined a new community of technology startups in Central Eurasia at the Silkroad Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Currently, work is underway to bring CerebraAI's medical imaging software to the US market.