SoundHound, a voice assistant maker, will go public through a merger with Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co. values the voice assistant maker at $2.1 billion, the companies said on Tuesday. SoundHound, founded in 2005 by a group of Stanford graduates, offers a voice platform based on artificial intelligence to help businesses integrate conversational voice assistants into their products. Hyundai Motor, Mercedes-Benz, Mastercard, and Snap are customers.

Not surprising, search queries on Google for “NFT” and “nonfungible token” have become more popular than searches for “Dogecoin”, “blockchain” and even “Ethereum.”

As technology gets increasingly complex, companies like Microsoft and others will continue to build out educational options to teach marketers how to use their products. It's been done for years by Google, Microsoft and others, but increase during the past year. Microsoft on Monday announced an update to Learning Lab, Microsoft Advertising’s hub. It now has resources for 13 foundation-level search product and feature courses on topics like UET and conversion trackingOpens in new window, Microsoft Advertising EditorOpens in new window, Google ImportOpens in new window, bidding and budgetsOpens in new window, and more.

Google and parent Alphabet lost an appeal for a decision made in 2017 by the European Commission that found Google broke antitrust laws in how it used its search engine to promote its shopping comparison service and demote those of its rivals. The General Court today dismissed that appeal and upheld a fine of €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion). 

Searching for something in the metaverse? Consumer privacy nightmares have only just begun, as the advertising industry digs deeper into a virtual world filled with artificial intelligence and deep learning, despite all the work Google, Apple, Microsoft, and now Meta claim to do. Here's an example from The Verge. Adi Robertson writes "Even basic AR applications, like mapping an apartment to place a virtual screen, could potentially gather a huge amount of information," such as the size of someone's living space, books on the shelf, healthy or fatty snacks on the kitchen counter.