WhatsApp is Building Out its Business Team to Start Bringing in Revenue

Exciting news where WhatsApp has posted some job openings around monetization.  An old quote from its CEO summarizes it all: “That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today — through text messages and phone calls — so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.” Shocking reminder: WhatsApp has 200 employees. Totally insane how they built such an empire with such a small team. 

Career Chats Part 2: How Do You Set User Expectations?

A great interview between two Conversation Designers at X.ai and Wade & Wendy. We found it interesting how at Wade & Wendy, they’re very upfront that their AI is a chatbot, complete with self-referential jokes. At X.ai, while they don’t hide the fact that Amy or Andrew are AI, they ultimately leave it up to their users--letting them introduce them however human they prefer (scheduling assistant, AI Tool, or just “Amy”). Now that’s a metric we’d love to see--what percentage of people introduce her as more human like vs. bot. 

Cheat Sheets for AI, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning & Big Data

Compiled by Stefan Kojouharov, the founder of Chatbots Life himself, this is a phenomenal aggregation of cheat sheets on all our favorite topics. Our team was positively delighted, you will be too. Worth bookmarking for sure.

Why building an AI company should not remind you of a blind date | VentureBeat | AI | by John Brandon

Reply’s very own Clara de Soto gave the closing Keynote at VentureBeat’s MB2017 in San Francisco (along with the brilliant, Lauren Kunze). This article gives  a bit of the details from that presentation where they discussed the top 10 battle scars of building an AI company--and more importantly, how to avoid them. Fast forward to 6:53:38 to watch the whole thing here.