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Tag: Chat apps

  • India’s Sarvam launches Indus AI chat app as competition heats up | TechCrunch

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    Sarvam, an Indian AI startup focused on building models for local languages and users, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for web and mobile users, entering a fast-growing market dominated by global players including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

    The launch comes as India has become a key battleground for generative AI adoption. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT has more than 100 million weekly active users in India, while Anthropic said India accounts for 5.8% of total Claude usage, second only to the U.S.

    Indus serves as a chat interface for its newly announced Sarvam 105B model, the company’s 105-billion-parameter large language model. The app’s launch comes two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvam unveiled its 105B and 30B models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi earlier this week. At the summit, the startup also outlined enterprise initiatives and hardware plans and announced partnerships with companies including HMD to bring AI to Nokia feature phones and Bosch for AI-enabled automotive applications.

    Currently available in beta on iOS, Android, and the web, the Indus app allows users to type or speak queries and receive responses in text and audio. Users can sign in using their phone number, Google or Microsoft account, or Apple ID, though the service appears to be limited to India for now.

    Image Credits:Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch

    The app currently comes with some limitations. Users cannot delete their chat history without deleting their account, and there is no option to turn off the app’s reasoning feature, which can sometimes slow response times. Sarvam has also warned that access may be restricted as it gradually expands its compute capacity.

    “We’re gradually rolling out Indus on a limited compute capacity, so you may hit a waitlist at first. We will expand access over time,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar wrote on X, adding that the company is seeking feedback from users.

    Founded in 2023, Sarvam has raised $41 million to date from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures as it builds large language models tailored for India.

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    Sarvam is one of a small but growing group of Indian startups attempting to build domestic alternatives to global artificial intelligence platforms as India seeks greater control over its AI infrastructure.

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    Jagmeet Singh

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  • Here’s a Guide to Emojis You Should and Shouldn’t Use in the Office

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    Choosing your words carefully in the office is a given, because of the implicit difference between “professional” and “personal” settings…or so you might think: Gen-Z is beginning to shake up some of these norms. And now a new study shared with Inc. by productivity translation and localization outfit Lokalise may make you think carefully about one of today’s funnest and most-used forms of informal communication: the emoji. Should you give them a big thumbs-up 👍for intra-office comms?

    Lokalise surveyed over a thousand workers across the U.S., U.K., Germany and Mexico, and the one emoji that everybody agreed is verboten in a workplace setting probably won’t surprise you: the eggplant 🍆. If you’re unsure as to why this is the case, then a quick Google will help you out…though perhaps, ironically, it’s best not to do that googling at work. More tamely, and perhaps more surprisingly, U.S. workers deemed the lipstick-kiss emoji 💋as inappropriate for work, with 91 percent agreeing — the “highest rate for that emoji in any country,” Lokalise notes.

    Ok, we started with a bang there, straight into the controversial emojis. But Lokalise’s data shows that many people think that emojis don’t belong in the office, no matter their direct or implied meanings: 47 percent of respondents think this. Gen X (not boomers, for once!) is most in favor of this sort of ban, with 53 percent agreeing. Just 44 percent of Millennials feel this way.

    One reason for this feeling may be the risk of an emoji being misinterpreted — either by simple mistake, or by someone coming from a different generation or from a different cultural background. Seventy-four percent of Gen-Z respondents to the survey worry about this, for example. Meanwhile, 30 percent of respondents say they themselves have misinterpreted an emoji from a peer, and 27 percent say that someone’s workplace emoji use has actually offended them 😡. 

    Context and digital platforms may be important for correctly understanding an emoji. The data shows, for example, users of the Microsoft Teams work chat system are 71 percent more likely to say emojis are frequently misunderstood than users of the Slack chat service. There may be many reasons for this, of course, with perhaps the more “traditional” office populated by older workers using Teams — or it may be because the emoji implementation in these apps are different. Teams, for example, uses Microsoft’s own quirky interpretation of the emoji standards, whereas Slack has more simplified emojis and also allows users to upload and send their own emojis, perhaps with a personal meaning. (My favorite of these: a dancing penguin: for some text conversations it’s just the most appropriate response).

    Speaking of responses to text conversations, Lokalise found 60 percent of workers say they’ve used an emoji to cut a conversation short. And, as you may expect, the tendency to do this skews younger: 72 percent of Gen-Z use emojis like this. 

    Signaling exactly how useful emojis can be, however, 33 percent of the respondents said they’ve used an emoji to react to bad workplace news — events Lokalise suggests include “layoffs, warnings, or policy changes.” The survey is sadly silent on exactly which emoji were used here, but it’s easy to imagine someone who was recently laid off fighting the temptation to reply with an emoji that looks a lot like a conical pile of chocolate ice cream.

    The one big lesson for your company here is that emojis are hugely popular, and your workers likely will use them for workplace comms. 

    There are good reasons for this, including the fact that a single emoji can express subtle emotional meanings in place of typing out a sentence or two 🌈, and for time-pressed staff 😵‍💫 the few seconds it takes to click on a tick emoji ✅ to say they’ve completed a task may give them an extra free minute to relax and sip a coffee ☕️ before moving on to the next task. Emojis are also undeniably fun.

    Perhaps it’s not worth issuing a formal emoji policy, since some workers will respond with a shrug 🤷, and others with more, ahem, emphatic emojis 💀. But maybe you should remind your staff that emojis are a form of speech 💬, and probably should follow company policy on what is and what is not acceptable to say at work.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Telegram now lets users to convert personal accounts to business accounts | TechCrunch

    Telegram now lets users to convert personal accounts to business accounts | TechCrunch

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    Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee. This gives users the ability to list information such as location and opening hours, which might be helpful for small cafes and shop owners.

    Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies. On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.

    “Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to an entirely new level,” he said.

    Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features. However, a major differentiation is that Telegram is charging a subscription fee to use business features, while WhatsApp relies on the type of conversations and frequency of chats to generate revenue.

    Meta-owned WhatsApp introduced many business-facing features last year including personalized customer messages and flows to complete e-commerce transactions without leaving the app.

    Over the last two years, Telegram has focused on increasing its business through premium subscriptions, self-custodial crypto wallet, and auction of premium usernames. The chat app, which has more than 800 million users across the globe, is also planning to launch its ad platform this month with a revenue-sharing program for channels.

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    Ivan Mehta

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  • How Texting Customers Could Be the Engagement Tool You Need

    How Texting Customers Could Be the Engagement Tool You Need

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    As we head into the home stretch of the 2022 fiscal year, sales teams everywhere are looking to close as many deals as possible. Deloitte expects 2022 holiday retail sales to increase by 4% to 6% from the previous year.

    Given inflation, the firm also expects consumers to shop early and take their time finding the best prices. According to GE Capital Retail Finance, consumers spend an average of 76 days researching major purchases, meaning there might be just enough time left in the year for a sales push.

    Knowing when and how to contact consumers with an offer or deal is a fine art. Having the right content at the right time and delivered on the customer’s preferred channel is key, especially in the later stages of the customer journey — this is where an omnichannel communication platform comes in handy.

    Omnichannel communications — a strategy that uses a combination of websites, apps, social media, phone calls and other ways to reach an audience — have become a necessity for businesses looking to deliver the best experience along the entirety of the customer journey. Leveraging additional platforms such as chat and messaging apps on top of the standard web, social media and app channels provides frequent opportunities to get in front of potential buyers at the right point in their journey.

    Related: Redefining Omnichannel: How To Be Where Your Customers Are

    For busy consumers juggling a ton of priorities, email is not always the best option for communication. On the other hand, chat apps or texts are quick and literally in their face instantly.

    Compared to email, the more personal nature of SMS is one of the leading reasons these messages have an incredible 98% open rate in the U.S., with 60% of those messages being viewed within the first five minutes they are received. Meanwhile, chat apps like Discord, Line, Telegram, Viber, WeChat and WhatsApp are especially popular in countries like Brazil, China, India and Nigeria, where more than 80% of consumers reported using chat apps to interact with brands.

    Buyers want a tailored experience as they progress from first hearing about a service or product all the way through to their purchase. Understanding the needs and expectations of busy consumers and communicating solutions to those needs in a time-efficient and effective way can convince them to buy. Chat apps and SMS provide more opportunities to personalize communications with a specific buyer and require less effort on their part to reply than returning an email or visiting a website.

    Related: 5 Ways to Use Texting to Grow Your Sales and Marketing

    When to leverage messaging

    To be clear, a chat app/SMS strategy for engaging your audience should be brought in methodically, and it should never be used to reach out to a net new buyer.

    An unsolicited chat or text message can be seen as “spammy” and risks the consumer feeling ambushed on their personal device, ending any potential relationship then and there. Deeper into the customer journey, however, these messages can work wonders once relationships have been established in other ways.

    Take the case of a typical consumer sales process. The GE Capital Retail Finance survey found that consumers start researching a product or service online more than 60% of the time, and they visit two to three online sources and a comparable number of physical stores before deciding to buy.

    Capturing customer information from website visits or app downloads can provide marketers with a window into their preferred channels. Providing follow-up information, offers or other communications based on their previous activity personalizes the interaction between brand and consumer.

    Related: Here’s Why SMS Marketing Is Literally the Best Idea Ever

    The power of messaging

    For many, SMS is the most powerful engagement tool during the buyer’s journey. According to my company’s research, marketers cited SMS’s primary benefits as real-time delivery, high open rates and global reach/ubiquity of mobile devices. Additionally, marketing professionals plan to use digital communications to support their customer engagement efforts, including forging meaningful connections with consumers, improving accessibility and improving omnichannel communications.

    And it works. The same survey showed that 80% of B2C marketers reported SMS performed much better than any other channel, especially for advertising and brand awareness. Additionally, more than three-quarters of marketers who send promotions or offers through SMS reported revenue growth in 2020-21, a time when connecting with consumers was challenging due to the pandemic. SMS might just be the future of marketing — our research showed that two-thirds of Gen Z favor text messages over email when interacting with a brand.

    This makes sense. When we want to get a quick note off to a friend or family member, we don’t log into our email and compose a long note — we text them. It is no different for brand engagement. Meeting your customer in the moment with a message that resonates on the device that rarely leaves their side is the most effective way to move the sales forward.

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    Sean Whitley

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