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• A Russian company said it paid 12 soldiers a combined $195,000 for shooting down an F-16 jet.
• Fores said it presented the soldiers the cash at a ceremony near the Russia-Ukraine border on Thursday.
• Kyiv had long coveted the US-made F-16. It received its first of the jets in

• I realized our family spent $2,500 in one month on food delivery.
• We immediately made changes, including strict rules around delivery and planned dinner alternatives.
• After just a few weeks, our spending is down to less than $400, with more savings to come.

My husband and I don't have many major vices. We don't drink, smoke

• I quit my corporate job to open a laundromat business, which is now worth millions.
• I had to learn to be resilient and how to keep pushing forward when the business gets difficult.
• Success doesn't always come in dollar amounts; you have to discover what it means for you.

When most people think about entrepreneurship

• I found out in 2021 that I had diabetes.
• My first concern was what the diagnosis would mean for my on-the-go lifestyle.
• Now I'm the healthiest I've ever been, and I'm calling 2025 the "year of yes."

When I found out I had diabetes in February 2021, I thought it was a death sentence. I was in denial, especially since I ate a healthy diet and exercised.

Still, for

• Voice AI is already part of restaurants' drive-thru and phone ordering systems.
• Now, some companies are trying to make their AI assistants sound more like real people.
• Domino's, for instance, uses different accents for its AI in different parts of the US.

AI is finding its voice — and using it to take your weeknight pizza order.

Restaurants, including Domino's and Wingstop, have used voice AI assistants for years to chat with customers on the phone and take their orders. Lately, though, they've been finessing those assistants by adding region-specific accents, adjusting their tone, and making other changes that make them more natural for customers to converse with.

"If someone hears a really off-putting, unrelatable voice, they're going to hang up," said Lily Clifford, the CEO and founder of Rime Labs, which developed the text-to-voice model that Domino's and Wingstop use.

Multiple restaurant chains are using voice AI to take customers' orders. But Rime's experience shows that it's not as easy as shoving an AI assistant with a robotic voice in a drive-thru or on one end of a phone line.

Rime develops the text-to-voice technology that Domino's uses for phone ordering. Another company, ConverseNow, provides the AI assistant itself.

When ConverseNow started working with Domino's about five years ago, it used a different voice that many customers didn't want to speak with, said Akshay Kayastha, director of engineering at ConverseNow.

"There was one point where 50% of the people were just saying they just didn't want to talk to it," and asked to be transferred to a human, he said.

Rime's technology has pushed that number closer to 100%, Clifford said. Domino's uses the text-to-voice feature in about 80% of its phone orders in North America, she added.

"It should sound like someone who could work at Domino's and not someone who is a 20th-century American broadcast radio announcer," Clifford said.

To develop its technology, Rime built a recording studio in San Francisco and recorded a variety of people having conversations with a friend or a family member. The goal, Clifford said, was to capture what day-to-day speech sounds like instead of using voice actors reading rehearsed lines.

The resulting technology can use a variety of speech patterns.

Domino's customers who order by phone in Atlanta, for instance, are likely to reach an AI assistant that speaks with a Southern accent. Rime says that it has also developed a voice that speaks using African-American Vernacular English. The voices that Rime uses don't belong to real people, though, Clifford said.

Tone is another area where Rime's technology has improved voice AI, Kayastha said.

One restaurant chain that ConverseNow works with pointed out a problem with an earlier version of the startup's voice AI: It sounded more chipper than most fast-food workers. Rime's technology helped match the tone to the situation, Kayastha said.

"No one in real life speaks so cheerfully at a drive-thru," he said. "You've got to turn it down."

The voice-to-text technology also correctly pronounces specific menu items, such as MeatZZa, a Domino's pizza with pepperoni, ham, Italian sausage, and beef. That's key for restaurants, Clifford said, given all of the unconventional spellings and limited-time offers that appear on their menus.

Domino's has grown its online ordering options lately. Customers can place orders on Domino's website, through its app, or through third-party services like Uber and DoorDash.

But phone orders remain a key part of the pizza chain's business, CEO Russell Weiner said during an earnings call in late 2023.

"We have a large number of our customers coming in on online ordering, but we still need to make sure that the phones are there operationally," Weiner said.

Domino's and Wingstop did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Workers across many industries are worried that their bosses will use AI to replace them. Clifford said that Rime's restaurant clients aren't using its AI voice technology to replace employees, though.

Restaurant workers are often too busy preparing food, helping customers who show up in-store, and completing other tasks to take phone orders, she said. In that sense, voice AI that can field orders is taking a task off their plate.

"If you're at the restaurant making pizzas and wings, you do not want to answer that phone," Clifford said. "You have a million other things to do."

• Israel's military is the first to use laser weapons to shoot down drones in war.
• The systems were prototypes and are being integrated into the country's air defenses.
• Videos and photos show the system, made by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Israel's military used new laser weapons to

• My partner Liam and I used to bicker over chores fairly frequently.
• However, after making a joke relating to astrology to which tasks we prefer, we made a new system.
• Now, we choose our chores by our zodiac signs, and our house runs much more smoothly.

My partner Liam and I were in an

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Happy Saturday! How would you feel if you were invited to a wedding on a Thursday? While some guests were pretty angry, this writer thinks it's pretty smart. Find out why!

On the agenda:

• The most common sign of colon cancer is one that can be hard to talk about

• Ultra-processed foods are consistently linked to bad health outcomes, but they can be hard to avoid.
• A cardiologist writing a book about longevity decided to quit UPFs almost entirely.
• He shops the perimeter of the grocery store and enjoys more salads and yogurt.

When cardiologist Eric Topol goes to the grocery store these days, his cart stands out among the crowd. It's no longer

• The Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America is an all-new $7.6 billion EV factory.
• HMGMA, located near Savannah, Georgia, opened its doors in March of this year.
• The factory will be able to build 500,000 EVs and Hybrids for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis every year.

The $7.6 billion Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, or HMGMA, is one