Text messages get more response than perhaps any other medium, mostly because people assume they are coming from other human beings.  Emotive is taking care of that, using artificial intelligence with human assistance to “replicate human interactions” to prevent cart abandonment, recommend products, and run promotions.  They just raised a $50 million Series B to do even more of it.

This Twilio survey also sees more silver lining than cloud, reporting that companies plan to add an average of four new communications channel this year. Nearly all (91%) of respondents would rather build than buy new communications solutions. The report provides interesting regional breakdowns if you care for that sort of thing.

The generative AI world is moving so quickly that it’s hard to know what’s worth reporting. But cross-medium content creation is still pretty new, so let’s note that Microsoft’s Bing search engine / chatbot can now create images from text prompts. That’s pretty impressive, at least for this week.