Gokak/Gurugram, March 2021: Following the recent promising results in beta testing, Whatsapp India is set to launch a swathe of new features in the market. In an exclusive interview with The Hindustan Grimes, WhatsApp India’s Chief of Operations, Mr. Shabdh Ghosh, makes some groundbreaking announcements.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and abridged for brevity.
It seems that WhatsApp as a whole is having a new moment. You’re the old player in a market where customers seem to be getting disillusioned. What changes are you bringing to your product, and likely, to the other products in the market?
Yes. We have a range of changes that we’ve tried and tested in the beta program and are ready to bring to the market. Our top new feature is the tone-aid for the emotionally challenged community and for just about anyone who’s just tired of figuring out signals.
So many companies are now vying to increase everyone’s IQ, we thought we’d try and augment everyone’s EQ instead. Tone-aid makes it really easy to read the tone of the conversation, be it a sarcastic friend, a depressed cousin, or a bewildering group chat. WhatsApp will automatically set the background of the chat to a different colour to indicate the mood of the texts.
This is going to be a game changer and help us keep our customers happy, or sad, or respectful, or whatever the emotion.
Wait! Doesn’t that void the end-to-end encryption of the messages?
People are now disillusioned about the end-to-end anyway. They know the reality. So our team thought we might as well try to roll out new features to aid our customers. We want to give our customers the best features they deserve. For free.
Hmm. We at the Grimes are agog to see how the customers will see this rollout. Are you at all concerned about your more privacy-focused competitors like Telegram and Signal?
Nah. It’s all just a fad. We saw their numbers increase in January and then fall again in February. Our numbers have stayed steady. The fad will pass. We’re not worried.
Right. So it would appear that the customers are not really concerned about their privacy at all. Is that so?
Yes. That’s what we saw.
Last month we tried out a new feature in beta where our AI helps you synthesise replies based on the detected or a custom chosen sentiment. Most of our beta testers loved it. They loved that we could help them create funny replies based on who they were talking to, instantaneously. It just works so great.
You say most of them liked. So there were people who didn’t like it. What do you expect went wrong there?
Oh, there were just a few mishaps. Sometimes stubby fingered customers find it hard to click on the right options in our UI. It can’t be helped. This one time clicking on the wrong custom sentiment resulted in an inappropriate situation. One of our betas ended up sending “Yo momma so old, she fukin’ died” instead of condolences, on hearing their boss’ mother passing away.
Oof. That is horrible. That seems like a major oversight on the part of your te—
No. No. No. It wasn’t really a big problem. The beta contacted us quickly, so we were able to unsend that message and not leave a trace.
On the flip side, some other betas heard of the story and requested an option where the AI would synthesize replies based on an arbitrary sentiment. They want a random mode.
And will you be acquiescing?
Of course. Who are we to deny what our customers want. And anyway it was an easy modification to our powerful AI. It can track the mood of the conversations while also supplementing those inferences with precise knowledge of the sender’s behaviour and cycles. It can track the changes with respect to diurnal or nocturnal cycles, moon cycles, and even seasons and semesters.
Woah! It seems like you are ready to bring the AI revolution to messaging. Do you expect the market to take in these changes easily?
There will always be friction. But if we bring the changes quickly, it will quickly go from the normal to a new normal and it’ll all be alright.
We’re not nearly done with the changes anyway. Our latest beta test was automated replies. It turned out that “I am fine mom.” and “Happy b’day …!” turned out to be the most used auto-replies. We think this is going to be a big hit too.
Mr. Shabdh Ghosh explained more planned features set to be released on April 1st. A more detailed transcript of the interview can be found here.