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Payment Asia signs strategic partnership agreement with Children’s Book Fair and TicketBear, promoting SMEs with FinTech

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HONG KONG, Feb. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — On February 28, APAC payment solutions provider Payment Asia announced a strategic partnership agreement with D&P Education Kingdom, the organizer of the Children’s Book Fair, and ticketing website TicketBear. The partnership will unite the educational publishing and exhibition industries to jointly promote the business development of small and medium-sized enterprises by introducing a new generation of payment solutions.

The vigorous development of parenting knowledge in recent years has promoted an increase in the number of related book publications. As the largest parenting education exhibition organizer in Hong Kong, the Children’s Book Fair successfully introduced 700 exhibitors and attracted 300,000 visitors by December last year. With Payment Asia and TicketBear’s onboarding, the event hopes to introduce new concepts and business opportunities through cooperation in different sectors amid this partnership.

According to the agreement, Payment Asia will provide innovative financial technology solutions to introduce more convenient payment systems for D&P Education Kingdom’s Children’s Book Fair and TicketBear’s ticketing platform, including contactless payment methods, as well as providing Web3 payment options, etc. This will not only enable consumers to enjoy a safer and more efficient transaction experience but will also help small and medium-sized enterprises expand their customer base and improve their competitiveness.

Regarding this cooperation, Payment Asia Hong Kong Sales Director Tanya Yeung said: “We are delighted to have reached this strategic cooperation agreement with D&P Education Kingdom and TicketBear. By introducing the latest financial technology, we are confident that we can open up new opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises. The possibility of multiple value-added services can help them succeed in this highly competitive market. We believe that combining financial technology with corporate needs can not only improve efficiency and reduce costs but also create more business opportunities and development space. This kind of cooperation is not only for the common interests of all parties but also to promote the healthy development of the entire industry ecosystem so that more companies can benefit from the advantages of digital transformation. We look forward to working with our partners to jointly create a new business situation in the future.”

Mr. Lawrence Chui, CEO of D&P Education Kingdom, said: “This strategic cooperation has successfully brought the latest payment experience to our vast merchant base. The Children’s Book Fair has always been committed to providing merchants with the highest quality exhibition experience, and this cooperation is an important step to realizing this vision and a crucial leap toward future development. By integrating payment solutions, we will jointly create a more convenient and secure payment environment for merchants. This cooperation is not only for the pursuit of commercial success but also to provide the best service experience so that every merchant can feel our dedication and commitment.”

Mr. Erik Suen, Founder of TicketBear, said: “Our mission has always been providing the most convenient ticketing system to the public. This cooperation with Payment Asia and Children’s Book Fair organizer D&P Education Kingdom aims to make businesses enjoy a more convenient ticketing experience. Not only do we provide traditional ticketing solutions but are also committed to adapting to the development trend of Hong Kong’s Web3 and introducing new services such as NFT to meet the market trend. This cooperation will bring more convenience and innovation, and promote the development of the entire ticketing industry.”

As of September 2023, the total number of exhibition activities in Hong Kong has recovered to 85% of the pre-epidemic level in 2019, and the total number of admissions has also recovered close to 80%. The industry expects that by the first half of 2024, Hong Kong’s convention and exhibition industry will fully recover to its pre-epidemic levels. To help the recovery of Hong Kong’s exhibition industry, the Hong Kong government has launched a three-year exhibition incentive scheme in July 2023. The 2024 Children’s Book Fair will be held in Hong Kong in May and more event details will be released later.

The signing of this strategic partnership agreement will undoubtedly inject new vitality into small and medium-sized enterprises and promote the healthy development of the e-commerce ecosystem. We look forward to Payment Asia, D&P Education Kingdom, and TicketBear working together in the future to witness the greater success of small and medium-sized enterprises with the help of financial technology.

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SOURCE Payment Asia

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Ally Waste Acquires Swift Integrated Services, Expanding Service Capabilities and Market Reach

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GILBERT, Ariz., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ally Waste, a nationwide provider of comprehensive waste solutions for multifamily communities, announced today that it has acquired Swift Integrated Services, a Utah-based provider of dumpster management, doorstep trash pickup, and waste brokerage services.

“Every acquisition we make starts with the same question: Will it help us serve customers better? Swift expands our reach and brings capabilities that allow us to support more of our customers’ waste needs. We’re excited to welcome the Swift team to Ally and build on what they’ve created,” said James Crawley, CEO of Ally Waste.

The acquisition expands Ally Waste’s presence in Utah, Florida, and Idaho markets while strengthening the company’s waste stream optimization capabilities. It also brings waste brokerage capabilities to Ally, giving current customers another way to address their waste needs as the offering is integrated.

“Joining Ally gives us the opportunity to build on what we’ve created while bringing our customers the support and resources of a nationwide team,” said Indigo Schumann-Curtis, President of Swift Integrated Services. “Our customers can expect business as usual, with many of the same people continuing to support them. I’m excited about what our teams can accomplish together.”

Swift Integrated Services customers can expect continuity in both service and support throughout the transition. The Swift team will continue with Ally, bringing established customer relationships and deep market knowledge to the combined organization.

About Ally Waste

Ally Waste is a nationwide provider of comprehensive waste solutions for multifamily communities, including valet trash and recycling, bulk removal, and waste stream optimization services. Its technology gives owners and operators clear visibility into what they’re paying for waste across a portfolio, paired with on-the-ground teams who put those insights into action.

The company’s culture is grounded in its values of Integrity, Grit, and Humility. These principles drive Ally Waste’s commitment to supporting multifamily teams and delivering consistent, high-quality service that improves everyday life for residents and on-site staff. Learn more at www.allywaste.com.

Media Contact:
Doridé Uvaldo
duvaldo@allywaste.com

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SOURCE Ally Waste

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Gupshup Launches Self-Serve Voice AI Platform, Extending Conversational Engagement into Phone Calls

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Businesses can now build, test, and deploy AI voice agents across support, sales, and operations – alongside WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS – from a single platform

MUMBAI, India and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Gupshup launched its Voice AI Platform, a self-serve console for building and running AI voice agents that handle calls end to end. The launch extends Gupshup’s engagement platform from messaging into voice, bringing support, sales, and operations onto the same infrastructure businesses use for WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS.

Gupshup’s Voice AI Platform resolves support calls, qualifies and converts leads, and automates operational calls such as scheduling, verification, and payment reminders, so human teams can focus on conversations that require a person.

The platform covers agent lifecycle in a no-code, prompt-based interface. Businesses configure an agent’s voice, language, knowledge base, system prompt, and workflows, then connect it to tools their teams use. Before going live, teams define guardrails, run simulations, and validate behaviour with tests – comparing models. Once deployed, analytics track success rates, satisfaction, and language usage, with transcripts, conversation history, and debug logs for review.

Gupshup’s platform is the first to bring unique capabilities. First, voice is a channel extension of a platform serving businesses across WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS – enabling voice-and-messaging experiences within a customer journey. Second, it supports telephony: PSTN and WhatsApp voice channels, on-premise and cloud deployment, and the option to bring PSTN infrastructure. Third, it is model-flexible – businesses choose speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and LLM providers rather than accepting a stack.

The platform builds on Gupshup’s experience powering customer engagement for 50,000+ businesses across 100+ countries and 25+ industries, processing 10 billion interactions monthly, including 500 million voice calls per month.

The Voice AI Platform has been beta tested and delivered outcomes across deployments. Users receive 100 minutes of credits to test, and pricing starts at USD 0.035 (INR 3.50) per minute.

“For customer engagement in emerging markets, Voice AI drives universal access – reaching every user regardless of language or literacy. In developed markets, it drives efficiency and automation. In both, it delivers cost savings, revenue growth, and satisfaction. With the launch of its Voice AI Platform alongside its messaging, Gupshup offers the only unified self-serve platform for customer engagement across voice and messaging,” said Beerud Sheth, Co-founder and CEO, Gupshup.

The Voice AI Platform is available to businesses at voiceai.gupshup.io.

For more information, visit www.gupshup.ai.

 

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SOURCE Gupshup Technology India Pvt Ltd

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Deepdub Launches Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational: Multilingual Text-to-Speech Built to Survive Real Customers, Not Just Demos

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Enterprise-grade real-time text-to-speech delivers 150ms time to first audio at full 48 kHz, with text normalization that gets account numbers, invoice totals and appointment dates right

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Deepdub, a foundational voice AI company pioneering expressive voice technologies, announced today the launch of Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational, a new multilingual text-to-speech model with high-fidelity 48 kHz audio, improved text normalization and extended Hebrew support. The model is available to all Deepdub clients now.

For enterprises running voice agents, a call holds together when four things go right at once. The voice sounds like a person. The response arrives fast enough to feel like a conversation. The agent knows when to speak and when to listen. And every account number, date and amount comes out the way a customer would say it. When one of them slips, the call escalates to a human, and that is where containment and cost are decided. Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational is built for all four.

“Every voice model sounds impressive for two minutes in a demo. Very few survive two weeks with real customers,” said Ofir Krakowski, CEO and co-founder of Deepdub. “Deployments don’t stall on the 95% a model gets right, they stall on the misread account number, the mangled surname, the one wrong digit on a live call. We built this model for that last few percent, because in production, the last few percent is the whole product.”

In English, the work is in text normalization, the step that turns written text into spoken words. A delivery date written 2024-12-31 is read as December thirty first, twenty twenty-four rather than as a run of digits. An invoice total written $1,240 is read as one thousand two hundred forty dollars. An appointment at 14:30 is read as two thirty. A reference written Chapter VII is read as chapter seven rather than as letters. These are the categories where Deepdub’s testing puts the model ahead of the other systems it was measured against. An enterprise running more than one language gets one set of behavior to test and one contract to hold rather than two.

Phantom Z 3.4 delivers an end-to-end p95 time-to-first-audio of 150 milliseconds in real-time mode at full-range 48 kHz audio, with cross-language voice transfer from under three seconds of reference audio. Deepdub builds and trains its own speech models from random rather than licensing them, which allows the company to bring a new language into production in two weeks. Deepdub covers more than fifty locales and dialects verified by local voice and language experts, inside a platform supporting more than 50 locales and dialects.

“We run Deepdub in production for live, real-time phone calls, where latency and naturalness aren’t nice-to-haves but the key factor in whether a caller stays on the line. 3.4 is the closest we’ve heard a synthetic voice come to a real person, and our callers show it: they stay longer, talk more, and engage with our agents like we’ve never seen before,” said Adir Haziza, CTO at Voiceman.

The hardest case is Hebrew, which is written without vowels, so the same letters can spell different words. The three letters of שלט are a sign read one way and a remote control read another. A model that reads one word at a time has to guess which the sentence means, and in Hebrew a wrong guess is not an accent, it is a different word that stays invisible until a customer hears it. Phantom Z 3.4 resolves this at the source. Pronunciation is decided from the whole sentence rather than word by word, and every instance of שלט in Deepdub’s Hebrew test set was read correctly. Where a brand name or a plan tier has to be said a particular way, marking it in the text is enough. Deepdub ranks first for Hebrew text-to-speech on the public TTS Arena leaderboard hosted by ivrit.ai on Hugging Face.

In Hebrew, national ID numbers, appointment dates and transaction amounts are expanded before speech, so a balance written as 1,240 ₪ is spoken in full rather than read out as digits. In blind listening tests, Phantom Z 3.4 was preferred over Deepdub’s previous Hebrew model in 71 percent of decisive comparisons.

“We needed something that would hold up consistently across a large volume of work, so we tested it thoroughly before deciding. What stood out was that the details came out right and the Hebrew was the most natural we’d heard,” said Dor Levy, Head of Jeen Talk at Jeen AI.

About Deepdub
Deepdub is the foundational voice AI model company pioneering expressive voice technologies for global enterprises across TV, film, advertising, gaming, e-learning, and AI-agent applications. The company’s international team of technology, dubbing, and linguistic experts deliver an end-to-end voice solution that preserves the emotional and cultural integrity of original content in more than 50 locales and dialects. With an advisory board that includes media leaders such as Kevin Reilly, former Chief Content Officer at HBO Max, and Emiliano Calemzuk, former President of Fox Television Studios, Deepdub is eliminating language barriers to enable the global diffusion of media on major streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Visit https://deepdub.ai or follow us on LinkedIn for more information.

Deepdub Media Contact
Zivit Katz
Deepdub
zivit.katz@deepdub.ai

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SOURCE Deepdub

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