News
Cameo’s New Feature Allows Live Calls With Celebrities
Celebrity video message app that lets users send their friends a greeting from a famous celebrity is expanding to allow live two-way video chats.
Have you ever wanted to sit down for an intimate chat with your favorite celebrity? Imagine being able to quiz your favorite musician about their guitar technique, or ask an actor about their experiences on set. Well, that just became a reality with the recently announced Cameo Live.
Cameo is an app that already allows you to request personalized pre-recorded video messages from celebrities by paying them a fee. Although the platform does have a direct messaging system, Cameo has recently upgraded its service with 10-minute live video calls.
Users can request a callback around their own schedule, and the sessions also allow an option to include more than one person to listen in. Here’s a breakdown of the features from Cameo itself:
- Book the 10-minute live video call with one of the thousands of athletes, actors, musicians, comedians, creators, reality stars, and other pop culture personalities.
- Opt for a one-on-one conversation, invite up to nine friends and family members to join you, or gift the call to a loved one.
- Propose three date/time options that work best for you, giving you more schedule control.
Although the idea sounds promising, it’s difficult to see how users won’t abuse the new feature. Cameo seems to have thought of that very eventuality and put specific measures in place.
“Cameo uses technology to auto moderate the chat function of Cameo Live to protect against things like profanity and hate speech,” says Brandon Kazimer, Cameo Spokesperson.
Also Read: Intro Platform Connects Users To Celebrity Experts
Celebrities can decline calls if they feel threatened, as well as terminate chats mid-session if things go wrong. Concerns aside, the new feature does sound like a lot of fun, though depending on the celebrity, it could be pricey to set up a chat.
So who would you like to book for a celebrity chat? With prices anywhere from $100 to $900, you’d be well advised to make notes to ensure you get your money’s worth!
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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