Kruti: Multilingual Indian Assistants for Everyday Tasks

Most AI assistants are built in English and then translated. Kruti wasn’t. It launched in 13 Indian languages from day one—and that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Krutrim is India’s first AI unicorn, valued at $1 billion and spun out of Ola by Bhavish Aggarwal. They launched Kruti on June 12th. It’s an “agentic” AI assistant, which these days gets slapped on anything that sounds fancy. But Kruti actually earns the label: it doesn’t just answer questions. It books cabs, pays bills, orders food, generates images. Real transactions through real APIs—not chatbot parlor tricks.

AI Adoption Divide: The Global North vs. South

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro. My first startup ran on a shared hosting plan that went down every time it rained hard enough to flood the server room in Botafogo. That was 2010. The infrastructure has improved since then, obviously, but when I watch the AI discourse from San Francisco — all the breathless predictions about how AI will transform every industry — I keep thinking about that server room.

Google Messages: New Connection Features for Android

If you’ve ever received a text from an iPhone user that reads “Laughed at ‘hey are you coming tonight?’” instead of just showing a laughing emoji — you know the pain. That little text description of a reaction is one of the most annoying artifacts of the Android-iPhone messaging divide.

Google just fixed it.

Yesterday, Google announced a set of updates to Google Messages that target exactly this kind of friction. They’re not flashy. They won’t make headlines the way a new Pixel launch would. But they’re the kind of quality-of-life improvements that make cross-platform texting — something most of us do dozens of times daily — significantly less awful.

Expanding RCS Reach: Carrier Connectivity Milestones

The RCS landscape in late 2021 looks nothing like it did a year ago. Not because of some flashy feature drop, but because the connectivity fabric — the actual plumbing that lets RCS messages flow between carriers — has hit a density that changes the math for operators still sitting on the fence.

I’ve been watching this space pretty closely, and honestly? The infrastructure story is more compelling than whatever new emoji reactions just shipped.