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Jonathan Kemper

Jonathan writes for THE DECODER about how AI tools can improve both work and creative projects.
Read full article about: Deutsche Telekom puts Elevenlabs AI on the phone to handle customer calls

Deutsche Telekom is soon using AI voice agents from Elevenlabs in its customer service. Customers can talk to realistic-sounding AI voices around the clock through the app or by phone. The partnership between Europe's largest telecom company and the AI audio startup goes back a while. Since October 2025, Magenta customers have been able to convert text into podcasts up to 25 times a month for free in the MeinMagenta app. Deutsche Telekom also invested in Elevenlabs' Series C funding round.

According to Elevenlabs' internal data, the AI support agent successfully resolves about 80 percent of user queries, particularly when it comes to specific documentation questions. For more complex issues like troubleshooting or pricing inquiries, though, the system still hits its limits and needs to hand off to human support.

Elevenlabs recently launched a marketplace for licensed voices of famous people like John Wayne and Judy Garland. Last year, the company introduced the Eleven v3 voice model with expanded expression options.

Google's MedGemma 1.5 brings 3D CT and MRI analysis to open-source medical AI

Google has updated its open-source medical AI with MedGemma 1.5, a model capable of analyzing 3D medical scans like CTs and MRIs. The release also includes a specialized speech tool that reportedly outperforms OpenAI’s Whisper in medical dictation tasks, though strict licensing conditions apply for clinical use for both models.

Web world models could give AI agents consistent environments to explore

Researchers at Princeton University, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania have developed an approach that gives AI agents persistent worlds to explore. Standard web code defines the rules, while a language model fills these worlds with stories and descriptions.

China captured the global lead in open-weight AI development during 2025, Stanford analysis shows

Chinese open-weight AI is conquering the world: According to a Stanford analysis, models from China have already overtaken their US counterparts in distribution and adoption. But with success come growing geopolitical and security risks.

AI benchmarks are broken and the industry keeps using them anyway, study finds

Benchmarks are supposed to measure AI model performance objectively. But according to an analysis by Epoch AI, results depend heavily on how the test is run. The research organization identifies numerous variables that are rarely disclosed but significantly affect outcomes.

Researchers extract up to 96% of Harry Potter word-for-word from leading AI models

Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, 1984: researchers pulled nearly complete books from commercial language models. Two of the four systems tested didn’t even put up a fight. The findings could shape ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI companies.

ByteDance's StoryMem gives AI video models a memory so characters stop shapeshifting between scenes

ByteDance tackles one of AI video generation’s most persistent problems: characters that change appearance from scene to scene. The new StoryMem system remembers how characters and environments should look, keeping them consistent throughout an entire story.

AI reasoning models think harder on easy problems than hard ones, and researchers have a theory for why

If I spent more time thinking about a simple task than a complex one—and did worse on it—my boss would have some questions. But that’s exactly what’s happening with current reasoning models like Deepseek-R1. A team of researchers took a closer look at the problem and proposed theoretical laws describing how AI models should ideally ‘think.’