Khosla Ventures-backed Fireflies.ai, an AI-powered note-taking app, on Wednesday released a set of domain-specific “mini apps” to extract insights from meeting transcripts automatically. With the widespread availability of automatic speech recognition models and generative AI, meeting intelligence startups like Otter, Read AI, Circleback, Krisp, and Granola have registered impressive growth. Fireflies, similarly, has seen 8x expansion in terms of users and has achieved profitability, according to co-founder and CEO Krish Ramineni.

WhatsApp announced on Wednesday it’s launching a new feature that will allow users to add an extra layer of privacy to chats. The new “Advanced Chat Privacy” setting prevents you and the people you’re chatting with from exporting chats and auto-downloading media to their phone. The setting also prevents users from mentioning Meta AI in messages or asking Meta AI questions. The idea behind the feature is to give everyone in a group reassurance that no one can take what is being shared and said outside the chat. It’s worth...

Sierra Metals is bowing to a raised offer from privately held Peruvian miner Alpayana that values the copper producer at roughly 244.2 million Canadian dollars, the equivalent of $176.8 million, sending its shares soaring. The Toronto company said Wednesday it reached an agreement in principle that would see Alpayana offer C$1.15 a share in cash. The bid has the unanimous support of Sierra's board, which plans to recommend that the company's shareholders accept the offer. In morning trading, Sierra's shares rallied 19% to C$1.09. That widened the advance so far...

Ever since 1276, when popes began to be elected by a conclave of rigorously sequestered cardinals, that secretive process has been an irresistible source of fascination. In recent times, reporters with pages to fill, novelists seeking the sensational and moviemakers with eyeballs to attract have often lurched into the implausible, even madcap, in suggesting what conclaves are like. The conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis as the spiritual head of 1.4 billion Catholics will be unique in its composition and dynamics. Understanding how it works means getting some...

The University of Louisville has reportedly agreed to pay nearly $1.6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a former professor who was fired for criticizing transgender treatments for children experiencing gender dysphoria. Dr. Allan Josephson worked for nearly 15 years as chief of the University of Louisville's Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology. According to his legal complaint, Josephson was able to turn around the struggling division during his tenure and received perfect scores in his 2014-2016 annual reviews.

Behold, the latest in deep-sea fashion: An unfortunate fish sporting parasitic copepods as pigtails. An international team of scientists affiliated with the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute spotted the critters during a recent expedition to the South Sandwich Islands, in a remote stretch of the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of South America and Antarctica. In haunting footage captured about 1,604 feet (489 meters) under the sea, cameras captured the tubular crustaceans latched onto the fish’s back.

Dignitaries and world leaders will attend the pope’s funeral in a few days. But the thousands of people lining up to see Francis on Wednesday were a more diverse mix. VATICAN CITY — This is not how she thought she would see her pope. A Catholic pilgrim from southern India, Mary Eliza Sajeev, 19, exited the gaping doors of St. Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday, stoic with her family after a brief glimpse of the ashen man in a wood-sided coffin. She had waited 3½ hours for a glance lasting a...

Jelly Roll has gotten one step closer to receiving a full pardon for his previous convictions. The Tennessee Board of Parole officially recommended the 40-year-old musician receive a full pardon following a 45-minute hearing which included statements from a number of witnesses, including Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall, who runs Nashville’s jail. The hearing ended with a vote, in which the board reached a unanimous agreement to recommend the musician be pardoned, with only one board member recusing themselves from voting. "This was incredible," Jelly Roll, whose real name is Jason...