This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a Scandinavian accent, and I offered to shake hands. As our palms met, it said: “I have a firm grip.”

When the home’s owner, a Norwegian engineer named Bernt Børnich, asked for some bottled water, the robot turned, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with one hand.

Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and writing computer code. Now humanoids, machines built to look like humans and powered by AI, are poised to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Børnich is CEO and founder of a startup called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

His startup is among the dozens of companies planning to sell humanoids for homes and businesses. Investors have poured $7.2 billion into more than 50 startups since 2015, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks the tech industry. The humanoid frenzy reached a new peak last year, when investments topped $1.6 billion. That did not include the billions that Elon Musk and Tesla, his electric car company, are pumping into Optimus, a humanoid they began building in 2021.

Entrepreneurs like Børnich and Musk believe that humanoids will one day do much of the physical work that is now handled by people, including household chores like wiping counters and emptying dishwashers, warehouse work like sorting packages, and factory labor like building cars on an assembly line.

Simpler robots — small robotic arms and autonomous carts, for instance — have long shared the workload at warehouses and factories. Now companies are betting that machines can tackle a wider range of tasks by mimicking the ways that people walk, bend, twist, reach, grip and generally get things done.

Because homes, offices and warehouses are already built for humans, these companies argue, humanoids are better equipped to navigate the world than any other robot.

The push toward humanoid labor has been building for years, fueled by advances in both robotic hardware and AI technologies that allow robots to rapidly learn new skills. But these humanoids are still a bit of a mirage.

Internet videos have circulated for years showing the remarkable dexterity of these machines, but they are often remotely guided by humans. And simple tasks like loading the dishwasher are anything but simple for them.

“There are many videos out there that give a false impression of these robots,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Though they look like humans, they aren’t always behaving like humans.”

Neo said “Hello” with a Scandinavian accent because it was operated by a Norwegian technician in the basement of Børnich’s home. (Ultimately, the company wants to build call centers where perhaps dozens of technicians would support robots.)

The robot walked through the dining room and kitchen on its own. But the technician spoke for Neo and remotely guided its hands via a virtual reality headset and two wireless joysticks. Robots are still learning to navigate the world on their own. And they need a lot of help doing it. At least for now.

“I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible.”

I first visited 1X’s offices in Silicon Valley nearly a year ago. When a robot named Eve entered the room, opening and closing the door, I could not shake the feeling that this wide-eyed robot was really a person in costume.

Eve moved on wheels, not legs. Yet it still felt human. I thought of “Sleeper,” the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy filled with robotic butlers.

The company’s engineers had already built Neo, but it hadn’t learned to walk. An early version hung on the wall of the company’s lab.

In 2022, Børnich logged on to a Zoom call with an AI researcher named Eric Jang. They had never met.

Jang, now 30, worked in a robotics lab at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and Børnich, now 42, ran a startup in Norway called Halodi Robotics.

A would-be investor had asked Jang to gather some information about Halodi to see if it was worth an investment. Børnich showed off Eve. It was something he had dreamed of building since he was a teenager, inspired — like many roboticists — by science fiction (his personal favorite: the 1982 movie “Blade Runner”).

Jang was entranced by the way that Eve moved. He compared the Zoom call to a scene in the sci-fi television drama “Westworld” in which a man attends a cocktail party and is shocked to learn that everyone in the room is a robot.

“I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible,” Jang said.

The would-be investor did not invest in Halodi. But Jang soon convinced Børnich to join forces.

Jang was part of a Google team teaching robots new skills using mathematical systems called neural networks, which allow robots to learn from data that depicts real-world tasks. After seeing Eve, Jang told Børnich that they should apply the same technique to humanoids.

The result was a cross-Atlantic company they renamed 1X. The startup, which has grown to around 200 employees, is now backed by over $125 million in funding from investors that include Tiger Global and OpenAI.

“All of this is learned behavior.”

When I returned to the company’s lab about six months after meeting Eve, I was greeted by a walking Neo. They had taught it to walk entirely in the digital world. By simulating the physics of the real world in a video-game-like environment, they could train a digital version of their robot to stand and balance and, eventually, take steps.

After months spent training this digital robot, they transferred everything it had learned to a physical humanoid.

If I stepped into Neo’s path, it would stop and move around me. If I pushed its chest, it stayed on its feet. Sometimes, it stumbled or did not quite know what to do. But it could walk around a room much like people do.

“All of this is learned behavior,” Jang said, as Neo clicked against the floor with each step. “If we put it into any environment, it should know how to do this.”

Training a robot to do household chores, however, is an entirely different prospect.

Because the physics of loading a dishwasher or folding laundry are exceedingly complex, 1X cannot teach these tasks in the virtual world. It has to gather data inside real homes.

When I visited Børnich’s home a month later, Neo started to struggle with the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door. The robot’s Wi-Fi connection had dropped. But once the hidden technician rebooted the Wi-Fi, he seamlessly guided the robot through its small task. Neo handed me a bottled water.

I also watched Neo load a washing machine, squatting gingerly to lift clothes from a laundry basket. And as Børnich and I chatted outside the kitchen, the robot started wiping the counters. All of this was done via remote control.

Even when controlled by humans, Neo might drop a cup or struggle to find the right angle as it tries to toss an empty bottle into a garbage can under a sink. Though humanoids have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, they are still not as nimble as humans. Neo, for instance, cannot raise its arms above its head.

Neo can also feel a little creepy, like anything else that seems partly human and partly not. Talking to it is particularly strange, given that you are really talking to a remote technician. It’s like talking to a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination.”

By guiding Neo through households chores, Børnich and his team can gather data — using cameras and other sensors installed on the robot itself — that show how these tasks are done. Then 1X engineers can use this data to expand and improve Neo’s skills.

Just as ChatGPT can learn to write term papers by analyzing text culled from the internet, a robot can learn to clean windows by pinpointing patterns in hours of digital video.

Most humanoid efforts, including Musk’s Optimus and similar projects like Apptronik and Figure AI, are designing humanoids for warehouses and factories, arguing that these tightly controlled environments will be easier for robots to navigate. But through selling humanoids into homes, 1X hopes to gather enormous amounts of data that can ultimately show these robots how to handle the chaos of daily life.

First the company must find people who will welcome an early version of a strange new technology into their homes — and pay for it.

1X has not yet set a price for these machines, which it manufactures at its own factory in Norway.

Building a humanoid like Neo costs about as much as building a small car — tens of thousands of dollars.

To reach its potential, Neo must capture video of what happens inside homes. In some cases, technicians will see what happens in real time. Fundamentally, this is a robot that learns on the job.

“What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination,” Børnich said. “It is going to be a really bumpy road, but Neo will do things that are truly useful.”

“We want you to give us your data on your terms.”

When I asked Børnich how the company would handle privacy once the humanoids were inside customers’ homes, he explained that technicians, working from remote call centers, would only take control of the robot if they received approval from the owner via a smartphone app.

He also said data would not be used to train new systems until at least 24 hours after it was gathered. That would allow 1X to delete any videos that customers did not want the company to use.

“We want you to give us your data on your terms,” Børnich said.

Using this data, Børnich hopes to produce a humanoid that can do almost any household chore. That means Neo could potentially replace workers who make their living cleaning homes.

But that is still years away — at best. And because of growing shortage of workers who handle both house cleaning and care of elders and children, organizations that represent these workers welcome the rise of new technologies that do work in the home — provided that companies like 1X build robots that work well alongside human workers.

“These tools could make some of the more strenuous, taxing and dangerous work easier and allow workers to focus on things that only human workers can offer,” said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents the country’s house cleaners, home-care workers and nannies.

Soon, Neo began cleaning the towering windows on the side of the house. Then as I turned back to Børnich, I heard a crash on the kitchen floor. After an electrical malfunction, Neo had fallen over backward — fainting dead away.

Børnich picked the robot up as if it were a small teenager, carried it into the living room and laid it down on a chair. Even passed out, Neo looked human.

Other humanoids I’ve met can be intimidating. Neo, under 5 1/2 feet tall and 66 pounds, is not. But I still wondered if it could injure a pet — or a child — with a fall like that.

Will people let this machine into their homes? How quickly will its skills improve? Can it free people from their daily chores? These questions cannot yet be answered. But Børnich is pressing forward.

“There are a lot of people like me,” he said. “They’ve dreamed of having something like this in their home since they were a kid.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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After our baby arrived in the summer, I learned I was wrong.

It turns out there is no best baby gear, because what worked for other parents often didn’t work for us. Even though I had picked a top-rated stroller, its wheels were inadequate for our neighborhood’s pothole-riddled streets. The electronic bottle warmer listed as a must-have by many Redditors was too slow at heating up milk for our vocal newborn. The Snoo, the $1,700 robotic bassinet with a cult following, did nothing to lull our little one to sleep.

Now past the sleepless nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I wound up with a well-rested, content child. What helped, in part, was pivoting to a different approach with baby gear, analyzing our particular problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them.

My highs and lows with baby tech may not be every parent’s experience. But the lessons I learned from my misadventures, from internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable.

Here’s what to know.

Upgrading knowledge triumphs over fancy gizmos, including Snoo.

When our daughter was first born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet I bought from another parent through Facebook Marketplace. But when she turned about 3 months old, she began loudly protesting naps. That made me consider the Snoo, the chicly designed white bassinet that automatically sways and plays sounds to soothe a fussy baby.

Among parents, the Snoo is a polarizing product not just because of its price ($1,700, or $160 a month for rental). Several of my friends with the privilege of owning one called the device a godsend that saved them from the brink of insanity. Others said their child hated it. I had read the book about soothing newborns written by the Snoo’s creator, Harvey Karp, so I wanted to give it a shot.

Fortunately, a friend lent me a Snoo. I downloaded a companion app and paid a $20 subscription for access to some of its extra perks, including a rocking motion that mimicked the bumps and jostles of riding in a car.

My baby was initially unfazed when we strapped her in. But when she started crying and the bassinet reacted by swaying and playing white noise, she cried even louder. After a few weeks of experimenting, we reverted to her old-school bassinet.

A spokesperson for Happiest Baby, the company behind Snoo, said it was ideal to acclimate babies to the product as soon as they were born because it simulates the movements and sounds a baby experiences inside a mother’s womb. However, the company advertises Snoo as suitable for babies up to 6 months of age, and my daughter fit this criterion.

The tech that eventually helped? E-books.

One late night, I downloaded a $14 e-book by a pediatrician about infant psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my 3-month-old was fighting sleep and how to anticipate when she would need a nap. We tried the book’s methods, and within a few weeks my baby began napping regularly and sleeping through the night.

Knowledge is more powerful — and cheaper to access — than a fancy bassinet.

The best tech are those that help parents with broken brains.

My wife and I found the most useful baby tech to be smartphone apps that helped us process information in our sleep-deprived state. The free app Huckleberry, a tool for parents to log bottle feedings, diaper changes and sleep durations for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the baby’s needs with each other when we took turns working shifts. It also provided useful data for our pediatrician.

Also helpful was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s free Milestones app, which shows a checklist of a child’s expected developmental milestones at each age, such as learning to roll at 6 months.

When she was about 7 months old, our daughter began to crawl. We could no longer take our eyes off her, so we shifted to consuming more parenting literature through a different medium: audiobooks.

Single-task baby tech is unnecessary

Lots of popular baby tech are gadgets that serve a single purpose.

The $60 Hatch Rest, a night light that plays white noise, is a product on many parents’ lists of must-haves for helping babies sleep. The $250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that can alert you to a baby’s movements and cries, is another. So is the $50 Philips Avent electronic bottle warmer, which heats up a bottle of refrigerated milk with the press of a button in a few minutes.

I received all of those products as gifts through our registry. Though I liked using them, I ultimately realized other products I already owned could accomplish the same tasks.

Nanit Webcam

Price: $250

It had an impressive set of features for monitoring our baby, including a tool that automatically detected what time I put her to bed and what time she woke up. But that feature required the camera to be mounted on a tall tripod against a wall to get a bird’s-eye view of the crib, which was unfeasible with the layout of our bedroom.

We used the Nanit just like any webcam for periodically checking on the video feed of our child in her crib. That could also be done with any general-purpose security camera, like the $100 indoor Nest Cam.

Hatch Rest’s Night Light

Price: $60

Our baby slept better in pitch dark, so the Hatch Rest, the colors of which can be changed through a smartphone app, proved unhelpful. (Maybe when our daughter is older she will appreciate that the light can be set on a timer so it illuminates when it’s time for her to wake up.) We used only the feature for playing white noise. When we traveled, we used a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, making a dedicated sound machine superfluous.

Philips Avent Bottle Warmer

Price: $50

Initially it seemed useful, but every caregiver for our daughter, including relatives, my wife, myself and now our nanny, stopped using it. We each independently realized that a metal coffee mug partly filled with hot water from the sink was faster.

This is not to say that any of the aforementioned products won’t work well for another parent. But the problem with the premise of the best baby gear is that it requires any two infants to be alike, which is rarely the case.

It’s best to get to know your baby before starting a list, rather than the other way around.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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KOFORIDUA, Ghana — Charles Owusu Aseku has traveled across Ghana and beyond in search of care for the large growth of tissue called a keloid on his neck since 2002. The 46-year-old was growing increasingly frustrated after two unsuccessful surgeries and a trip to South Africa that ended with just a consultation.

Aseku was preparing for yet another medical trip until late February when he joined others in the first trial of 3D telemedicine technology in Ghana powered through computer screens in the back of a van.

Those behind the initiative, developed by Microsoft’s research team in partnership with local doctors and researchers, say the remote assessment will help provide medical consultations for patients awaiting surgery or after an operation, in a region where the doctor-to-patient ratio is among the lowest in the world.

The project builds on earlier trials in Scotland and now works as a portable system with enhanced lighting and camera upgrades.

Once inside the van, cameras will capture a 3D model of each patient and the image is then projected onto a large computer screen. Multiple doctors can join the consultation session online and manipulate the 3D model to assess the patient.

“The idea behind the van is to allow it to travel to those remote villages that don’t have specialized care … to perform a pre or post-surgical consult,” said Spencer Fowers, principal software developer and 3D-telemedicine project lead at Microsoft Research.

The initiative also gives patients the opportunity to have multiple opinions. Aseku’s session had doctors from Rwanda, Scotland and Brazil, an experience that he said gave him hope.

“I see a lot of doctors here and I am very happy because experience will come from each of them and maybe they will find a solution to my problem,” the 46-year-old said.

Researchers hope the trial at the Koforidua Regional Hospital, in Ghana’s eastern region, is the start of a wider project that could expand the service and explore new use cases.

Recent years have seen growing use of telemedicine, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say such digital tools can benefit patients in Africa the most because there are so few specialist doctors for the continent’s 1.4 billion people.

George Opoku, 68, was referred to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in the capital Accra — nearly 100 kilometers away from the Koforidua hospital, which is much closer to his home — where he had first gone to seek care for sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that develops in the bones and soft tissues.

Upon hearing about the 3D telemedicine trial, his doctor decided to register him for the process, saving him the extra expenses and stress of long-distance travel.

“This time I had to sit in a van and to introduce myself and condition to not only one doctor but several of them. I was able to answer all their questions and I am hopeful that they will discuss and cure me of my condition,” Opku said. “I feel well already and I am hopeful.”

A key challenge for the project is the lack of stable internet access, a common problem in remote parts of Africa.

At the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, the technology is helping patients in need of plastic surgery. An inadequate number of plastic surgeons means that patients often have to consult with different doctors during each visit.

Dr. Kwame Darko, consultant plastic surgeon at the hospital and one of the principal investigators on the project, said that 3D telemedicine could give patients the chance to be seen by multiple doctors during one session.

The 3D technology could make a difference if replicated in Ghana and elsewhere, according to Dr. Ahensan Dasebre, chief resident doctor at the National Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Burns Centre at Korle-Bu, who was not part of the project.

“We are already behind in terms of how many doctors are available to care for a certain number of the population,” he said.

“If somebody is in a remote part of town where he doesn’t have access to these specialized services, but needs it, the referring doctor could actually use this telemedicine thing to get access to the best of care.”

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The Post, its affiliated newspapers in MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, the Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of stealing millions of copyrighted news stories to benefit popular AI products like ChatGPT.

Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein’s ruling Wednesday preserves the core elements of the lawsuit, which will now go forward to trial. While Stein rejected efforts to dismiss claims related to statute of limitations, trademark dilution and stripping content management information from the content in question, he dismissed CMI claims against Microsoft along with a secondary CMI claim against OpenAI, and one other unfair competition claim against both defendants. The judge dismissed additional claims for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times.

“We get to go forward with virtually all of our claims intact, including all of the copyright filings,” Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for The Daily News and the Times, said. “It’s a significant victory, albeit a preliminary stage of the case.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.

In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said “hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on ChatGPT to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and to solve hard problems. We welcome the court’s dismissal of many of these claims and look forward to making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.”

Microsoft and OpenAI don’t deny they depend on copyrighted material, instead arguing that it’s under their rights to do so under the fair use doctrine. Under that doctrine, the use of copyrighted materials are permitted under certain circumstances, including using the materials for educational purposes.

The Post and affiliated newspapers filed the suit in 2024, challenging that notion, alleging the companies “simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely.”

“This decision is a significant victory for us,” said Frank Pine, executive editor at MediaNews Group. “The court denied the majority of the dismissal motions filed by OpenAI and Microsoft. The claims the court has dismissed do not undermine the main thrust of our case, which is that these companies have stolen our work and violated our copyright in a way that fundamentally damages our business.”

The Post brought its suit alongside its sister newspapers, MediaNews Group’s The Mercury News, The Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press; and Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Pine also addressed recent efforts by Big Tech to lobby the Trump administration to weaken copyright protections.

“OpenAI lobbying the government to loosen copyright laws to make their thievery legal is shameful and un-American. They have a $150 billion valuation for a product they acknowledge could not have been built without the copyrighted content they stole from journalists, authors, poets, scholars and all manner of creatives and academics. Makers pay for their raw materials, and good businesses bolster their communities by creating economies and industries, not by destroying them.”

Microsoft and OpenAI are accused in the litigation of harming the newspapers’ subscription-based business model by misappropriating journalists’ work and providing it for free. The cases allege that the AI models also risk tarnishing reporters’ reputations by sometimes misstating their reporting or attributing it to others.

The papers are seeking unspecified damages, restitution of profits and a court order forcing the companies to stop using their materials to train chatbots.

“We look forward to presenting a jury with all the facts regarding OpenAI and Microsoft copying and improper use of the content of newspapers across the country,” Lieberman said.

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Five months after the assault, she lay on a mat in a displacement camp in South Sudan’s capital, rubbing her swollen belly. “I felt like I wasn’t heard … and now I’m pregnant,” she said. The Associated Press does not identify people who have been raped.

Sexual assault is a constant risk for many women in South Sudan. Now one aid group is trying to bridge the gap with technology, to find and help survivors more quickly. But it’s not easy in a country with low connectivity, high illiteracy and wariness about how information is used.

Five months ago, an Israel-based organization in South Sudan piloted a chatbot it created on WhatsApp. It prompts questions for its staff to ask survivors of sexual assault to anonymously share their experiences. The information is put into the phone while speaking to the person and the bot immediately notifies a social worker there’s a case, providing help to the person within hours.

IsraAID said the technology improves communication. Papers can get misplaced and information can go missing, said Rodah Nyaduel, a psychologist with the group. When colleagues document an incident, she’s notified by phone and told what type of case it is.

Tech experts said technology can reduce human error and manual file keeping, but organizations need to ensure data privacy.

“How do they intend to utilize that information, does it get circulated to law enforcement, does that information cross borders. Groups need to do certain things to guarantee how to safeguard that information and demonstrate that,” said Gerardo Rodriguez Phillip, an AI and technology innovation consultant in Britain.

IsraAID said its data is encrypted and anonymized. It automatically deletes from staffers’ phones. In the chatbot’s first three months in late 2024, it was used to report 135 cases.

When the 28-year-old was raped, she knew she had just a few days to take medicine to help prevent disease and pregnancy, she said.

One aid group she approached scribbled her information on a piece of paper and told her to return later to speak with a social worker. When she did, they said they were busy. After 72 hours, she assumed it was pointless. Weeks later, she found she was pregnant.

IsraAID found her while doing door-to-door visits in her area. At first, she was afraid to let them put her information into their phone, worried it would be broadcast on social media. But she felt more comfortable knowing the phones were not personal devices, thinking she could hold the organization accountable if there were problems.

She’s one of tens of thousands of people still living in displacement sites in the capital, Juba, despite a peace deal ending civil war in 2018. Some are afraid to leave or have no homes to return to.

The fear of rape remains for women who leave the camps for firewood or other needs. Some told the AP about being sexually assaulted. They said there are few services in the camp because of reduced assistance by international aid groups and scant government investment in health. Many can’t afford taxis to a hospital in town.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to freeze USAID funding during a 90-day review period is exacerbating the challenges. Aid groups have closed some services including psychological support for women, affecting tens of thousands of people.

Technology isn’t widely used by aid groups focused on gender-based violence in South Sudan. Some organizations say that, based on survivors’ feedback, the ideal app would allow people to get help remotely.

Stigma surrounding sexual assault further complicates efforts to get help in South Sudan. It’s especially hard for young girls who need to get permission to leave their homes, said Mercy Lwambi, gender-based violence lead at the International Rescue Committee.

“They want to talk to someone faster than a physical meeting,” she said.

But South Sudan has one of the lowest rates of mobile access and connectivity in the world, with less than 25% of market penetration, according to a report by GSMA, a global network of mobile operators. People with phones don’t always have internet access, and many are illiterate.

“You have to be thinking, will this work in a low-tech environment? What are the literacy rates? Do they have access to devices? If so, what kind? Will they find it engaging, will they trust it, is it safe?” said Kirsten Pontalti, a senior associate at Proteknon Foundation for Innovation and Learning, an international organization focused on advancing child protection.

Pontalti has piloted two chatbots, one to help youth and parents better access information about sexual reproductive health and the other for frontline workers focused on child protection during COVID.

She said technology focused on reporting abuse should include an audio component for people with low literacy and be as low-tech as possible.

Some survivors of sexual assault say they just want to be heard, whether by phone or in person.

One 45-year-old man, a father of 11, said it took years to seek help after being raped by his wife after he refused to have sex and said he didn’t want more children they couldn’t afford to support.

It took multiple visits by aid workers to his displacement site in Juba before he felt comfortable speaking out.

“Organizations need to engage more with the community,” he said. “If they hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have come in.”

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For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

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The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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That was until last week, when her company, Wave Bye, launched its line of supplements to promote cycle regularity and help curb bleeding and cramps.

“(Women) are not trying to be superhuman,” the OB-GYN said. “They just want to feel normal.”

Wave Bye, which Harrison founded in 2023, sells a “backbone” daily supplement called Bye Irregularity to make periods more predictable. Those are intended to treat several symptoms, including potential migraines, fatigue and irritability that come from premenstrual syndrome.

Once you know your schedule, the company’s period-specific products, called Bye Cramps and Bye Bad Cramps, are more effective, she said.  They prevent messengers from telling the uterus to contract and bleed, she added.

“You need to take the supplement every day to regulate your cycle, and then what differentiates our (other) products is they need to be taken two days before bleeding,” Harrison explained. “If you block symptoms two days before, you totally change the period experience.”

Other medications and remedies are sparse, Harrison said.

Though women will use Midol and Tylenol for relief, those pills target the brain rather than the uterus directly, she said. There are also gummies on the market for PMS, but she added that there’s nothing like Wave Bye’s two-pronged, premenstrual attack on irregularity and period pain using its Vitamin E-based product.

Heating pads and relief patches only do so much, too, Harrison added. She hopes that Wave Bye can be a more encompassing approach to the menstruation problem about half the population manages for decades of their lives.

The company sells the products in four bundles — each for different severities of symptoms – on its website. They cost between $70 and $80 on a monthly subscription, with one-time purchases and three-month and 12-month packs also available.

Harrison is also in negotiations to sell Wave Bye at yoga studios and health shops including Bridget’s Botanicals in Littleton. The company also offers revenue sharing or discount opportunities for health care professionals such as OB-GYNs and nurses.

“There’s no benefit from bleeding just to bleed. If you cut your hand, are you supposed to just let it keep bleeding? You’re not getting any benefit from not turning off the faucet,” Harrison said. “It’s not necessarily bad – it’s meant to support a pregnancy. But we want to reduce period pain and bleeding and make that period experience better in order to give people their time back.”

Harrison was a clinical researcher at Columbia University and the University of Colorado Anschutz, focusing on pregnancy in poor countries. She then went to consult VC-backed women’s health firms three years ago.

Through that and her work as an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains over the last two-and-a-half years, she saw the need for Wave Bye.

“I’d have patients sit up from an abortion and hear them say, ‘Well, at least that was less painful than my period,’” she said. “People get gaslit, and the OB-GYNs don’t deal with period pain until it’s really profound. It feels like there’s this gap. They just do what their moms or friends or community are doing.”

Wave Bye has so far raised $300,000 out of what Harrison hopes is an $875,000 round. Most of that is angel funding, she said, along with one Denver-area institutional investor. She hopes to close the round in the next couple of months.

The money will mostly be used to develop another product, which Harrison said will likely take at least two years, and continue work on a yet-to-be-released app to help users schedule their doses.

Wave Bye already saw some traction from a small batch of users late last year, so Harrison is confident sales will take off now that her business is officially off the ground.

Of the 25 units Wave Bye has sold, she said about half came from three- and 12-month purchases.

“If people trust the product,” she said, “they’re gonna get more.”

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She’s taking her reporting to YouTube.

Palmeri said she is leaving the startup Puck to strike out on her own, focusing much of her effort on the streaming giant. She joins a slew of other journalists who have left news organizations to build their own businesses around podcasts and newsletters.

But in politics, the most successful of these independent media stars have strong views and clear allegiances. Conservative hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly remain atop the podcasting charts, and anti-Trump media collectives are rapidly growing; two of them, The Contrarian and MeidasTouch, each have more than 500,000 newsletter subscribers, many of them paid.

That is not Palmeri.

“I’m not on a crusade,” said Palmeri, 37, the type of political journalist who proudly abstains from voting in elections while she’s covering them in order to maintain objectivity with her audience. “I’m not sold on either party, and that’s why I don’t really have a lot of friends.”

In her new venture, Palmeri wants to speak to audiences from the underdeveloped territory of “the middle,” she said, without a political agenda. “There isn’t really anyone there yet, and I want to try.”

In focusing on YouTube, Palmeri is also taking a slightly a different tack from many of the journalists who have recently left media companies — whether voluntarily or through layoffs or firings — to release their own content, typically on Substack. (Although she will have a Substack newsletter, too.)

YouTube says its viewers want more long-form news analysis, especially via podcasts. It recently announced having more than 1 billion monthly podcast listeners, outpacing any other media platform. (Watching and listening to podcasts is an increasingly fuzzy distinction.) Palmeri is part of a program meant to support “next generation” independent journalists on the platform with training and funding.

But whether “news influencers” like Palmeri can succeed at the same scale of popular partisan commentators is still untested. Many people say they want more unbiased news. Do they really?

Adam Faze, an emerging-media guru known for producing TikTok shows who is informally advising Palmeri, said he wasn’t aware of other political journalists approaching YouTube quite like her.

“Not with her access,” he said. Piers Morgan has been successful, Faze pointed out, but his YouTube channel is largely reminiscent of his cable news days, with cacophonous cross-talking panels and a green-screen cityscape backdrop.

“I don’t want you to go to this YouTube page and think, ‘I could have watched that on a cable channel,’” Palmeri said. She aspires to “speak like a normal person,” rather than a news anchor, and also “be more gritty.”

Palmeri takes pride in her grit. She often describes herself as “feared and fearless” — a daughter of New Jersey whose parents did not go to universities. Her zeal for scoops has made her variously unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans and occasionally other journalists.

Before Puck, while working for Politico, Palmeri reported on an investigation into a gun owned by Hunter Biden, a story that she said had “ostracized” her from her newsroom. In 2021, a deputy White House press secretary resigned after telling Palmeri that he would “destroy” her for reporting on his relationship with an Axios journalist who had covered the president.

An old-school tabloid sensibility drives Palmeri, who in her 20s door-knocked a couple of White House gate-crashers for The Washington Examiner and chased a “cop-killer” in Cuba for The New York Post. On her new Substack, The Red Letter, she plans to include blind gossip items, Palmeri said.

“She has a cadence that makes you feel like you’re just talking to a girlfriend” rather than a journalist, said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who encouraged Palmeri to go independent. This disposition can prove “a little dangerous,” Harris added: “All of a sudden you realize you’ve given up the state secrets.” In November, at a cocktail party in Washington, a former congressional staff member approached this reporter with the warning not to trust Palmeri, who was also at the party. (“I love that,” Palmeri later said.)

Palmeri has at times struggled to fit in while working at more traditional newsrooms, such as ABC News, where she spent about two years as a White House correspondent — the first of which she appeared infrequently on the air.

“I’ve always felt like there’s never really been a place that I’ve been at home,” she said.

After ABC, she hosted investigative podcasts for Sony about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and the wealthy family of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. She intends to continue making podcasts; her current show, “Somebody’s Gotta Win,” an election collaboration between Puck and Spotify’s The Ringer, is set to end in April, she said.

Puck, which she joined in 2022, was more suited to her self-driven (and self-promotional) streak than any other employer. “We’re kind of renegades,” Palmeri said, crediting Puck with helping find her voice.

“It was the closest place I had gotten to me writing directly to an audience, but it was still edited in a style that was not me,” she said. The tone was more “elite and impressive” than her natural voice; one example she offered was the frequent use of the word “indeed.”

To go independent, she is giving up her $260,000 base salary at Puck and funding her new venture with her savings. The dining table of her one-bedroom New York City apartment in brownstone Brooklyn has become her recording studio.

With an initial grant from YouTube, Palmeri bought about $10,000 worth of equipment, and tested and hired editors. (She and YouTube both declined to disclose the size of the grant.) In return, she has committed to publishing about four videos per week.

Investors are also interested in Palmeri, she said, though she has not decided whether or when to take their money. She would prefer to accept “squeaky clean” funding from both ends of the political spectrum, she said: “This is a trust business.” She has also considered a new line of credit or a small-business loan.

“I’m willing to bet on myself,” Palmeri said. “There’s no one over me telling me, ‘This is the headline, this is the angle.’ You don’t like it? It’s me. There’s no one else to blame.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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It can be hard to curb excessive use of smartphones and social media, which are addictive by design. Reducing your screen time is often more than just a matter of willpower, especially for younger people whose brains and impulse control are still developing.

If you’re a phone addict who wants to cut down on the hours a day spent looking at your device, here are some techniques you can try to free up more IRL time:

Delete apps

An easy first step is getting rid of any apps you’ve been wasting time on.

Over the past year, I’ve deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from my phone because I wanted to use them less. Now and then I’ll have to go the app store and reinstall one because I need to do something like post a photo I took on my phone. (Sometimes I’ll transfer the photo to my laptop and then post it to the web from there, but usually, it’s too much hassle.)

The danger with this approach is that if you do reinstall the app, you won’t bother deleting it again.

Use built-in controls

Both iPhones and Android devices have onboard controls to help regulate screen time. They can also be used by parents to regulate children’s phone usage.

Apple’s Screen Time controls are found in the iPhone’s settings menu. Users can set overall Downtime, which shuts off all phone activity during a set period. If you want a phone-free evening, then you could set it to kick in from, say, 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.

The controls also let users put a blanket restriction on certain categories of apps, such as social, games or entertainment or zero in on a specific app, by limiting the time that can be spent on it. Too distracted by Instagram? Then set it so that you can only use it for a daily total of 20 minutes.

The downside is that the limits aren’t hard to get around. It’s more of a nudge than a red line that you can’t cross. If you try to open an app with a limit, you’ll get a screen menu offering one more minute, a reminder after 15 minutes, or to completely ignore it.

Android users can use turn to their Digital Wellbeing settings, which include widgets to remind users how much screen time they’ve had. There’s also the option to create separate work and personal profiles, so you can hide your social media apps and their notifications when you’re at the office.

Don’t be distracted

There are other little tricks to make your phone less distracting. I use the Focus mode on my iPhone to silence notifications. For example, If I’m in a meeting somewhere, I mute it until I leave that location. Android also has a Focus mode to pause distracting apps.

Change your phone display to grayscale from color so that it doesn’t look so exciting. On iPhones, adjust the color filter in your settings. For Android, turn on Bedtime Mode, or tweak the color correction setting.

Android phones can also nag users not to look at their phones while walking, by activating the Heads Up feature in Digital Wellbeing.

Block those apps

If the built-in controls aren’t enough, there are many third-party apps, like Jomo, Opal, Forest, Roots and LockMeOut that are designed to cut down screen time.

Many of these apps have both free and premium versions with more features, and strongly push you toward signing up for a subscription by minimizing the option to “skip for now” on the payment screen. I tested out a few on my iPhone for this story.

To try out Opal, I reinstalled Facebook so I could block it. Whenever I tapped the Facebook icon, Opal intervened to give me various inspirational messages, like “Gain Wisdom, Lose Facebook,” and tallied how many times I tried to open it. To get around the block, I had to open Opal and wait through a six-second timeout before requesting up to 15 minutes to look at Facebook. There’s an option to up the difficulty by increasing the delay before you can look again.

Jomo, which I used to restrict my phone’s Reddit app, worked in a similar way: tap the Unlock button, which took me to the Jomo app, where I had to wait 20 seconds before I could tap the button to unlock Reddit for up to 10 minutes.

The OneSec app takes a different approach by reminding users to first take a pause. The installation, which involves setting up an automation on the iPhone’s Shortcuts, can be confusing. When I eventually installed it for my Bluesky app, it gave me a prompt to run a shortcut that wiped my screen with a soothing purple-blue and reminded me to take a deep breath before letting me choose to open the app — but in practice it was too easy to just skip the prompt.

The Android-only LockMeOut can freeze you out of designated apps based on criteria like your location, how many times you’ve opened an app, or how long you’ve used it.

The obvious way to defeat these apps is simply to delete them, although some advise users to follow the proper uninstall procedure or else apps could remain blocked.

Use external hardware

Digital blockers might not be for everyone. Some startups, figuring that people might prefer a tangible barrier, offer hardware solutions that introduce physical friction between you and an app.

Unpluq is a yellow tag that you have to hold up to your phone in order to access blocked apps. Brick and Blok are two different products that work along the same lines — they’re squarish pieces of plastic that you have to tap or scan with your phone to unlock an app.

The makers of these devices say that software solutions are too easy to bypass, but a physical object that you can put somewhere out of reach or leave behind if you’re going somewhere is a more effective way to get rid of distractions.

What about stashing the phone away entirely? There are various phone lockboxes and cases available, some of them designed so parents can lock up their teenagers’ phones when they’re supposed to be sleeping. Yondr, which makes portable phone locking pouches used at concerts or in schools, also sells a home phone box.

See a therapist

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for your smartphone compulsion. Maybe it’s a symptom of underlying problems like anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression or low self-esteem. If you think that’s the case, it could be worth exploring therapy that is becoming more widely available.

One London hospital treats “technology addiction” with a plan that includes dealing with “discomfort in face-to-face time” with other people, and exploring your relationship with technology.

Another clinic boasts that its social media addiction treatment also includes working on a patient’s technology management skills, such as “setting boundaries for device usage, finding alternative activities to fill the void of reduced online interaction, and learning how to engage more with the physical world.”

Downgrade your phone

Why not trade your smartphone for a more basic one? It’s an extreme option but there’s a thriving subculture of cellphones with only basic features, catering to both retro enthusiasts and people, including parents, worried about screen time. They range from cheap old-school brick-and-flip phones by faded brands like Nokia to stylish but pricier devices from boutique manufacturers like Punkt.

The tradeoff, of course, is that you’ll also have to do without essential apps like Google Maps or your bank.

___

Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.

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For Bob Bamber, the connection goes back to his great-great-grandfather, who homesteaded north of Pritchett, a tiny Baca County town of barely 100 people not far from the Oklahoma state line.

So the 44-year-old rancher took notice when he found out that a portion of the 10,000 acres of ranchland he and his father own and lease in neighboring Prowers County had been placed in a zone designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a potential high-voltage electric transmission corridor.

And he got agitated.

“It’s an emotional reaction because of that family connection,” said Bamber, bouncing in his truck along dirt roads that slice through prairie dotted with cedar trees, yucca and prickly pear cactus. “It sounds cliche, but you are part of the land out here.”

His worry echoes that of his over-the-fence neighbor. Val Emick fears that a transmission corridor, with towering pylons marching from New Mexico into three rural Colorado counties — Baca, Prowers and Kiowa — could disturb a fragile short-grass prairie landscape in the state’s far-southeast corner, lowering land values and disrupting ranching and farming operations that span generations.

“You go out seven days a week, and you build it and want to pass it down to your kids and your grandkids — it seems unfair,” said Emick, who has lived in the same house south of Lamar for 35 years and runs a cow-calf operation on some 5,000 acres. “And they come in with that threat.”

That threat is eminent domain — the power the government has to condemn and take land for public uses, like the construction of highways and other infrastructure. It must pay fair market value to the property owner for the land.

No determination has been made about the use of eminent domain to accommodate electric transmission lines as part of the Energy Department’s National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors initiative, or NIETC. But people in this part of the state have fresh and raw memories of the specter of condemnation that hung over the U.S. Army’s plan to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, northeast of Trinidad, nearly 20 years ago.

After both of Colorado’s U.S. senators expressed opposition to involuntary land sales for the expansion, the idea was scuttled in 2013.

“The biggest concern we have is eminent domain,” Prowers County Commissioner Ron Cook recently told The Denver Post inside the county courthouse in Lamar. “We’ve got third- and fourth-generation farmers and ranchers running these properties, and we sure don’t want them run off their land.”

The concern over the NIETC proposal brought a crowd out to the same courthouse last month. Some in the room, including Cook, said they had only recently learned of the project. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from the federal government.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert joined the meeting via video link and told the attendees she would push back hard on the corridor designation.

In an email to the Post this month, the Republican congresswoman said she reached out to newly confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fellow Coloradan, and got the public input period for the project extended from mid-February to April 15. In a Feb. 10 letter to Wright, Boebert said what was started under the Biden administration should be looked at again, with an option for the agency under President Donald Trump’s new administration to “shut this project down.”

“We can all agree that access to reliable energy is important for the health and prosperity of rural Coloradans, but that doesn’t mean we need to be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach dictated by D.C. bureaucrats who have failed to include community leaders in this process,” she said.

“Very important corridor” for grid

The NIETC program, which Congress authorized in 2005, tasks the Department of Energy with identifying areas of the country where transmission is lacking. It’s charged with determining where infrastructure is “urgently needed to advance important national interests, such as increased electric reliability and reduced consumer costs,” according to the program’s website.

Impacts from a compromised electric grid include more frequent and longer power outages and higher prices for energy due to a lack of capacity to move lower-cost electricity from where it is produced to where it is needed, the website says.

So far, no NIETC corridors have been established in the United States.

The Post asked the Department of Energy for comment via multiple phone and email requests but received no response. The department’s latest designation effort began last May with the release of a list of 10 possible transmission corridors, based on a National Transmission Needs Study that was completed in 2023.

That list was winnowed in December to three corridors, including what is known as the Southwestern Grid Connector — which would run up the eastern edge of New Mexico, scrape the western edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and pierce the southeast corner of Colorado.

The other two NIETC corridors being considered are in the Lake Erie portion of Pennsylvania and across parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska.

The Department of Energy says the Southwest Grid Connector could be anywhere from three miles to 15 miles wide, though the ultimate transmission line built would cover far less land. The corridor, the government says, is designed to follow existing transmission line rights-of-way for parts of its path.

“It’s a very important corridor,” said Adam Kurland, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in federal energy policy. “It’s probably the one that adds the most value to the grid.”

The Southwestern Grid Connector would help link the nation’s eastern and western interconnections, Kurland said, and would provide the ability “to exchange more power and serve a national grid.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the eastern interconnection operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains while the western interconnection covers states west of the Rockies.

“There’s very limited transfer between these two interconnects,” Kurland said. “There’s a lot of value for doing that, for reliability of the grid and for resilience against weather systems. You could more easily move power and supply power where it’s needed.”

More data centers, fewer coal plants

Grid Strategies, a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the company, are power-hungry data centers and manufacturing facilities.

A study that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden participated in last fall concluded that the U.S. transmission system — consisting of a half-million miles of power lines — will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers.

And a 2024 report by the nonprofit North American Electric Corp. determined that about half the continent was at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years. That risk comes as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity increases.

In Colorado, coal plants across the state have been shut down in recent years as worries about their climate-warming emissions escalate. All are expected to close by the end of 2030.

“The more transmission we build, the more flexibility and resilience we create,” said Mark Gabriel, the president and CEO of the Brighton-based electric cooperative United Power.

For eight years, Gabriel headed the Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells and conveys electricity across 17,000 miles of transmission lines to 15 western and central states.

“As coal goes away, we still need to move electrons,” he said. “How do we meet a growing demand at the same time we’re closing down generator resources?”

The state’s future demands on electric power are ambitious. While campaigning for his first term in office, Gov. Jared Polis said he wanted all of the power on Colorado’s electric grid to come from renewable energy sources by 2040. Rules adopted by Denver and the state aim to eventually make buildings all-electric.

And Colorado, with its goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030, recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold.

“You want to have a diverse portfolio of generation resources, and that portfolio is helped by more transmission,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t (achieve that) unless we have projects like this, and others, constructed.”

Farmers lament lack of “bargaining power”

But it’s how projects are constructed that matters to Steve Shelton, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher who lives about 10 miles south of Lamar. He grows wheat, corn and sorghum on 20,000 acres.

Shelton, 69, was on the other side of the transmission debate about 15 years ago, when he joined neighboring ranchers in exploring deals with a wind farm near Kit Carson to string electric wires across land in the state’s southeast corner.

“We had some farmers who said ‘No,’ and we’d have to find another path or sweeten the pot,” he said of the effort, which eventually fizzled out.

With the shadow of eminent domain in the mix this time, Shelton said, “you have no bargaining power.”

“They would get the development rights or the easement, and the farmer and rancher would have no income off of that,” he said.

The county’s fiscal health would also be impacted by a condemnation action by the government, said Prowers County Commissioner Roger Stagner, who served as mayor of Lamar for a decade. Taking land off the tax rolls would not only hit the county’s $41 million annual budget but would also have a ripple effect on the local economy, he said.

Boebert, in her Feb. 10 letter to the energy secretary, said the contemplated Southwestern Grid Connector would “affect approximately 325,000 acres of private land in Baca, Prowers and Kiowa counties in Colorado.” There are fewer than 20,000 residents combined in the three counties.

“Everything revolves around agriculture. If you’re going to take out that much land, it can affect the entire county,” Stagner said. “If there’s no alfalfa grown on that ground, that farmer doesn’t spend as much in town. That’s a big concern for us.”

Bamber, the Prowers County rancher, says he has no issue with the deployment of energy infrastructure across his property, so long as it’s done with full disclosure and landowner input. In fact, he and Emick, his neighbor, host dozens of wind turbines on their acreage that power the Twin Buttes wind farm.

“We’ve been able to live with the wind farm because they’ve compensated us,” Bamber said. “We’ve made the tradeoff for the money.”

Lease agreements they hammered out with the wind energy company to use their land made the deal palatable, Emick said.

“There was no hiding anything,” she said.

Broken trust, uncertain future

With the NIETC process already in the third of four phases, Cook is frustrated and befuddled that he and his fellow commissioners didn’t catch wind of the project before late January. That uncertainty has been a driving force behind much of the resistance to it among his constituents.

“That is what we’re struggling with — we have no idea how this is going to end up and what they’re going to do with it,” he said.

The Department of Energy describes the third phase of the designation process as the “public and governmental engagement phase.” During this period, the agency will decide the level of environmental review that applies to each NIETC project. It will conduct any required reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The agency conducted a webinar on the latest developments with the Southwestern Grid Connector in mid-January. And it issued a news release about the latest phase in December. But many in southeast Colorado think the federal government could have done a better job of outreach to local officials and property owners.

Some take hope in the success of opponents in Kansas last year who eliminated the Midwest-Plains and Plains-Southwest NIETC corridors that were part of the original 10 first proposed in the spring. U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, who represents that state’s 1st Congressional District, issued a statement in December after the Kansas transmission corridors were dropped.

“Kansans made it clear from the very beginning that we were not interested in the federal government seizing our private land,” Mann said, adding: “I’m glad our voices were heard in stopping this federal overreach.”

Boebert, in her letter to the energy secretary last month, cited Kansas’ resistance and urged the agency to “reconsider and halt further actions on current NIETC designations in Colorado initiated by the previous administration.”

That’s the right call, Bamber said.

“I’d like to see it just stopped — the trust is broken,” he said. “We’re an afterthought and we should have been partners in this.”

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The scene then cuts to the sheriff stopping the car on the road, opening the door and stepping onto the dirt road in his leather boots. He reaches for his holster and pulls out a revolver, points at the camera and shoots.

All of these sounds in the scene are important and carefully curated: the sound of the old truck, the dirt road, the leather boots and the revolver.

“All of these things have context, and that sound is what we’re focused on,” University of Colorado Boulder alum and sound design startup CEO and founder Isaiah Chavous said. “We’re focused on footsteps, door creaks, environmental noise, room tone and transitions.”

Chavous and his cofounders have raised $1.8 million to fund their sound design startup company called Noctal. Noctal is a platform that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to automate the sound design process for content creators and filmmakers.

The investment firm Caruso Ventures invested the majority of the $1.8 million, joining other investors including Media Empire Ventures, X’s, formerly known as Twitter, head of original content Mitchell Smith and Major League Baseball player Tony Kemp.

“I think these guys could emerge as the leader in applying AI to sound effects,” said Dan Caruso, Caruso Ventures managing director. “And if they do that, they will have a huge impact. There’s going to be a lot of job creation.”

Noctal works by identifying the action sequences and events that take place in a video and then accurately placing relevant sound files where they need to go based on the on-screen events.

James Paul, Noctal’s chief operating officer and co-founder, said the traditional process of developing sounds in movies is extremely time-intensive. Paul has more than 10 years of media experience working in physical production in Hollywood on films, including the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, and is an active member of the Producers Guild of America.

Paul said the process requires a person sitting in a chair watching hours of footage and marking where sounds need to go on a timeline. For example, marking when the sheriff’s truck begins to drive away and when his boots hit the dirt. Then, it requires going into folders, bins or the field to record the sounds.

“Using our platform, it automates a lot of that by extracting each of those different events,” Paul said. “The best way we see to use AI is like a creative augmentation. You’re still going to switch things out here and there, but it speeds up that process of having to watch all that footage.”

Before founding Noctal, Chavous was a student at CU Boulder. He was student body president, helped co-found the Center for African and African American Studies, co-founded the first-ever police oversight board on campus and received an award from the Colorado Senate for his work with eliminating prison labor contracts with the university.

Six days after he graduated in 2021, he moved to California. Chavous led business development and partnerships at an augmented reality game company, working with industry icons such as Lewis Hamilton, Snoop Dogg, Michael Bay, Elton John and Grimes.

He said his time at CU Boulder helped him grow and develop important skills, including team management and budget management.

“That in and of itself led to being able to create plans you can actually execute under timelines that would be considered impossible, which is the entire objective of building a startup, which is (that) you’re under time constraints that most people would say is impossible with limited resources,” he said. “… and also having conviction over a vision.”

Caruso said that when everything in sound design is done by hand, typically, there are one to three main sounds in a scene. But if AI helps, it can help identify background sounds as well, so there are five or six sounds in a scene instead.

“You wouldn’t do that because it would be twice as much work,” Caruso said. “But if AI does it, knows the volume of each, it can make a more enhanced video as well.”

Chavous said he hopes to positively impact people’s lives through Noctal’s capabilities.

“What we’re doing is redefining a workflow, we’re redefining what it means to create,”  Chavous said. “And being a part of that process to embolden the user or the creative is at the center of our DNA of our why.”

For more information, visit noctal.xyz/en.

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