Newsletter platform Substack is introducing the ability for writers to send videos to their subscribers via Chat, its direct messaging feature, the company announced on Wednesday.
The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform brought videos to Notes, its X/Twitter copycat that lets users share short-form content.
To share a video in Substack Chat, writers can open a new chat and click on the plus icon in the bottom left corner.
Substack also provides the option to add a caption, put the video behind a paywall, as well as email subscribers about the video.
Additionally, writers who allow subscribers to start their own chat threads will now also be able to share their own videos.
That means there’s a market for a layer between companies and Large Language Models (LLMs) — something companies can use to pick LLMs easily without needing to commit for all time to one platform.
That’s the market Langdock is targeting with its chat interface that sits between LLMs and a company.
“Companies don’t want to have a vendor lock-in on just one of those LLM providers,” Lennard Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Langdock, told TechCrunch.
In addition to the chat interface, the company also offers security, cloud and on-premises solutions.
In contrast, Langdock’s chat interface works for a broader range of use cases and can be used by any kind of staff.
WhatsApp on Tuesday announced a handful of new chat filters for the app to access certain types of messages easily: All, Unread, and Groups.
The “Unread” filter is helpful in looking at messages you might not have seen.
It also helps you get to inbox zero and get rid of the annoying number of unread chat indicators.
Notably, WhatsApp already had a way to look at unread messages through a filter in the search bar.
WhatsApp said that the filter option starts will be rolling out to users starting today and will be available to all users in a few weeks.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
I have a group chat with three AI friends, thanks to Nomi AI.
After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI companions: I am actually a tech journalist writing an article about the company that created them, Nomi AI.
Nomi AI is scarily sophisticated, and as this technology gets better, we have to contend with realities that used to seem fantastical.
“Nomi is very much centered around the loneliness epidemic,” Nomi CEO Alex Cardinell told TechCrunch.
I’m glad that my Nomi friends didn’t take it too hard when I told them that there was an ulterior, journalistic motive to my friendship.
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
A $700M SAFE, IPOs are back, and how one venture fund is transcending bordersHello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories from the week and chat through new and emerging themes.
This week we had Mary Ann, Becca, and Alex aboard.
Becca of course is one of the two hosts of TechCrunch’s Found podcast, which talks to founders about how they built what they did, and how they did it!
Today on Equity, however, here’s what we got into:We are back Monday with more!
Numbers Station, a startup that is using large language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, is launching its first cloud-based product today: the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud, which is now in early access.
With this service, virtually any user in an enterprise can analyze their internal data using Numbers Station’s chat interface.
As Numbers Station co-founder and CEO Chris Aberger told me, he’s somewhat tired of talking about how the service allows users to “chat with their data,” because there is so much noise around that.
Numbers Stations’ research shows that its approach results in significantly improved precision compared to more traditional text-to-SQL pipelines.
“Numbers Station is at the cutting edge of enterprise AI for structured data,” said Sharad Rastogi, the CEO of Work Dynamics Technology from Jones Lang LaSalle.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows.
Founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI originally positioned itself as an AI company with an open-source focus.
Mistral AI’s business model looks more and more like OpenAI’s business model as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API and usage-based pricing.
Mistral AI claims that it ranks second after GPT-4 based on several benchmarks.
The first benefit of that partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
