All of us talk to our pets, but what if our pets could talk back? That’s the premise of Personifi AI’s Shazam Band, a wearable that puts your pet’s mood, movements, and emotions into words. By using AI, it actually makes a two-sided conversation possible.

If all this sounds crazy, it’s only the beginning of what makes the Shazam Band one of the maddest pieces of tech we’ve seen in a while. And if I hadn’t actually seen it working, I doubt I’d believe it was real.

This is Shazam, an AI pet collar

Shazam (no, not that one) comes in two sizes, one for a dog and one suitable for cats, and is worn like a collar. It contains various sensors, including a 6-axis gyroscope, GPS, temperature sensor, speaker, and microphone. There’s a battery inside that lasts for several weeks on a charge and another battery in the box, so you can always have one charged up and ready to go. It uses AI to interpret your pet’s movements and actions and the tone you use when speaking to it to create verbal responses that reflect your pet’s intentions, thoughts, and personality.

I know. It sounds either staggeringly stupid or like the best thing ever, depending on your level of pet obsession. But stay with me, as it’s way better thought out than you may expect.

Wondering how Shazam interprets what your pet is thinking accurately enough to put it all into words that match your pet’s personality? The company has teamed up with Matt Beisner, a dog trainer best known for the Dog: Impossible show on Disney+, to train the AI, along with social media voice-over sensation Bobby Johnson, also known as “The RxckStxr,” and voice actor Jorjeana Marie.

Another key member of the team is Roscoe, Personifi AI’s founder and CEO John McHale’s dog. Roscoe is one of several hundred animals that have already been training the AI. Over a short Zoom video call ahead of the announcement, I saw Roscoe interact with McHale and other members of the team through Shazam. Not just tail-wagging, bouncing-up-and-down interaction, but verbal interaction. No, I haven’t gone crazy; it’s as barking mad as it sounds.

One of the strangest tech demos I’ve seen

When I spoke to McHale, it was early morning at their offices, and Roscoe had not been fed or walked and was apparently a little grumpy at being woken up. We laughed at the prospect of running a tech demo using an animal, a wearable, and an AI system interpreting its actions and operating in real time and how it was a recipe for things to go wrong. In reality, the next few moments were an eye-opening glimpse of a Dr. Doolittle-style future.

Roscoe was asked if he wanted to go for a walk and chase squirrels, as well as if he had been fed yet, all spoken in that usual rhetorical way we speak to pets. Except through Shazam, Roscoe replied. Not in that if-you-listen-hard-I-think-he-said-sausages way, but actually talked.

Well, Roscoe didn’t talk, but the words came from the speaker on the Shazam wearable and in a voice that brought out Roscoe’s lackadaisical personality. Yes, he was hungry, the squirrels were likely to get chased, and he was frustrated that none of these things had happened. The voice and style will be familiar to anyone who watches Bobby Johnson’s voice-over comedy skits.

It was one of the most bizarre tech demos I’ve seen, and I smiled and laughed throughout, my mind flip-flopping between childish joy and complete bewilderment. You won’t be discussing Tolstoy with your Shazam-wearing pet, but you will see a new side to its personality.

However, there’s the potential for a more serious use case too. McHale explained that he got the idea after Roscoe had been bitten by a snake and managed to hide the problem, but was clearly not himself. Roscoe eventually underwent several serious surgeries and survived, but if he had been able to say he’d been bitten by a snake, then things could have been taken care of far sooner.

Does it turn your pet into an AI chatbot?

Even with Shazam, Roscoe is unlikely to have been able to articulate he’d been bitten by a snake, but he may have been able to vocalize that he wasn’t well in a way we could quickly understand and act upon. Any resulting vet visit would have been memorable, too, that’s for sure.

Shazam may also be able to help your pet vocalize concern for you, bringing further emotional support to the moment when they come over and check in, as they seemingly understand that you’re sad, unwell, or in need of a furry hug.

Because Shazam is AI-driven and always learning, it’s not like getting a series of canned responses that approximate emotion. It’s more like an AI chatbot, but rather than being a voice from an empty vessel, Shazam takes real emotions and your pet’s personality, or the personality you give it, and blends them into a voice, so it shouldn’t come across as something it’s not or a completely artificial fabrication. Shazam has a choice of 27 characters, each with its distinct persona and tone ranging from a witty Southern belle to a fast-talking mafia boss, plus the ability to further craft individual personality traits through the app. Several voices are available in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as well.

The app also shows activity tracking data from the Shazam collar, and the built-in GPS keeps track of your pet, plus it has a geofencing feature to encourage it to stay within certain set boundaries. It does so by verbally telling the pet through the speaker that it’s going where it shouldn’t, as if it were its own subconscious, which should confuse the neighbors. You set a single voice as the primary caregiver and can program other secondary voices as well, to both add safety and keep things simple for the pet.

Giving your pet a voice isn’t cheap

Only you know if it’s worth it

We already recognize and try to understand our pet’s personalities and emotions. Shazam takes it to the next level by vocalizing those emotions in a language we understand. When you see it in action for the first time, it may look and sound a bit silly, but after a few moments, you will understand how much fun could be had with it and even how it could help keep your pet safe and healthy, too. How long that fun will last after the novelty has worn off is the big question. There’s also the considerable expense to find out.

Shazam is such a crazy product that you’re either going to walk away after seeing it, desperate to put in your order, or think it’s one of the most ridiculous things ever made. The voices and characters created by Personifi AI won’t be for everyone either, and the ones I heard went hard on their chosen hook — the superhero character was like an even more hyped-up Buzz Lightyear, for example. I imagine they could get quite grating. Though, if you don’t want Shazam/your pet to interrupt you, it’s as simple as saying “quiet,” just as you would normally do.

Every owner has wondered what their pet would say if it could talk, and Shazam does make it possible to somewhat answer that question. As to whether it works in the real world and outside the confines of a very short demo remains to be seen, but I came away from seeing Shazam in action thinking that there are going to be a lot of crazy cat and dog people out there who will lap this insane piece of tech up, no matter the cost.

Android’s Theft Detection Lock started rolling out in June with a wider rollout earlier this month, but today Google is making it even better with additional features in Android 15. If you were unaware that Theft Detection Lock even existed, that’s not surprising. It’s not exactly one of the more exciting features of Android and it’s not something that’s immediately user-facing like new homescreen features tend to be.

That being said, it’s a feature that most users should become familiar with. It’ll help you become better prepared for what to do if your phone is ever stolen. For instance, if your phone gets snatched, Theft Detection Lock uses AI to sense motion commonly associated with theft and locks the screen. This way thieves don’t have immediate access to your data. The device can also be automatically locked if excessive failed attempts are made to authenticate.

With Android 15, Google is expanding the helpfulness of Theft Detection Lock with the addition of authentication requirements for settings that thieves tend to go after.

Theft Detection Lock in Android 15 now requires authentication to turn off Find My Device

Find My Device and the Find My Device Network are great tools for any user to help locate a device that’s been misplaced. Unfortunately, thieves know how useful this is and tend to target it by disabling the feature. Making it harder for you to locate the phone and easier for them to resell it. Starting with Android 15, a new authentication requirement will be in place to prevent turning this off. So if your device gets stolen, thieves will still need to authenticate if they want to turn the feature off.

Google says that accessing this setting to turn it off will now require either a biometric authentication or the entry of a PIN or password. While not impossible to bypass, it’ll be a lot harder for the average thief to get around these protections. Another new authentication requirement being added is for removing your SIM.

Device resets become harder, ‘Identity Check’ coming later this year

When a thief steals your phone, the intention is to probably sell that device to make some quick cash. However, that’s a lot harder to do without being able to factory reset the device. With the new Theft Detection Lock improvements it will now be harder to perform a device reset without the device’s Google account credentials. This and the other features are most certainly useful, but of course, not foolproof. That being said, these are also meant, at least in part, to be deterrents for thieves as devices won’t be as easy to crack and resell.

Google mentions another feature coming later this year that should help add to these deterrents called Identity Check. This feature will be opt-in so it won’t be on by default. If enabled, however, biometric authentication will be needed to access a variety of Google account and device settings. This includes things like disabling the theft protection or changing the PIN. This authentication requirement also kicks in if someone is trying to access your passkey from a location that isn’t trusted.

By now, most people know passkeys offer a better way to protect their online credentials than passwords. Nearly every tech company of note, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, supports the protocol. Moreover, despite a slow start, adoption has dramatically increased in the last year, with, for instance, password manager Dashlane recently noting a 400% increase in use since the beginning of 2024. Still, not everyone knows they don’t need to rely on passwords to protect their online identity, and transferring your passkeys between platforms isn’t as easy as it should be.

That’s why the FIDO Alliance, the coalition of organizations behind the technology, is working to make it easier to do just that. On Tuesday, the group published draft specifications for the Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) and Credential Exchange Format (CXF), two standards that, once adopted by the industry, will allow you to safely and seamlessly move all your passkeys and passwords between different apps and platforms.

With some of the biggest names in the industry collaborating on the effort (including Apple, Google, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, to name a few), there’s a very good chance we’re looking at a future where your current password manager — particularly if you use one of the first-party ones offered by Apple or Google — won’t be the reason you can’t switch platforms. And that’s a very good thing.

“It is critical that users can choose the credential management platform they prefer, and switch credential providers securely and without burden,” the FIDO Alliance said. “Until now, there has been no standard for the secure movement of credentials, and often the movement of passwords or other credentials has been done in the clear.”

The CXP and CXF standards aren’t ready for prime time just yet. The FIDO Alliance plans to collect feedback before it publishes the final set of specifications and gives its members the go-ahead to implement the technology.

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Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, the founders of the upskilling platform Career Karma, announced today the launch of the company OutRival, which offers a service that hosts and lets businesses build their own customer service agents to take on customer interactions.

AI agent companies are hot right now, and AI is one of the only sectors in venture capital seeing a flood of money rush toward it. As of September, the VC industry poured at least $64.1 billion into the AI sector and a third of all VC dollars this year went to AI startups, according to PitchBook data reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Startups building AI agents have alone raised more than $8 billion this year, according to PitchBook data reported by the Verge.

Although OutRival is entering a crowded field, Harris feels now is the perfect time to take aim at the industry. Harris said he and Meyster saw firsthand how important personalized interactions are, as well as the limitations of existing systems like automated phone calls.

“Today with AI, not only are companies in every industry making technology a part of their core operations but AI is fundamentally changing how they do business and how people work,” Harris told TechCrunch. “We knew there had to be a way to scale personalized experiences using AI while making the technology accessible to people closest to the customer journey.” 

His company aims to differentiate itself from its competitors by helping — rather than replacing — existing consumer teams, encouraging them to easily build AI agents that can work with existing tools and systems to help converse with customers. The company has operated in beta mode for the past two years and says it’s already working with admissions teams at colleges to help ease workflow. It plans to expand to other industries.

Harris says Career Karma will continue as a separate company, just now owned by OutRival. (It’s even releasing a Netflix documentary on October 16 in partnership with Workday and LeBron James’ SpringHill Company about hiring overlooked talent). Harris told TechCrunch that they took everything they’ve learned from building Career Karma and applied it to the launch of OutRival.

“Career Karma taught us the power of personalized, human-centric interactions and how important it is to scale those experiences without losing the human touch,” he said. “OutRival takes what we’ve built for Career Karma and scales it, making it accessible for enterprises across industries.” 

Harris says that Career Karma will now use OutRival’s technology to enhance its own operations, creating AI-driven support to help with its job training platform. 

Investors are clearly down for the ride. OutRival is leveraging leftover capital from the $40 million Series B round Career Karma raised in 2022 and says his investors, which include Jack Altman and Initialized Capital, are excited to see what he and Meyster do next. 

“We’re excited to partner with more companies and show how OutRival can be a game-changer in delivering exceptional customer experiences,” Harris said.

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