Hello there! Luke's father has officially turned into AI. After 40 years of playing Darth Vader's voice, James Earl Jones is hanging up his gloves. Disney will now use Reespecher's text-to-voice AI solution to advance it's Sith agenda. How many more wars in far away galaxies are we in for?

Wait... They shipped what!?

WhatsApp is rolling out a feature that lets users share links to calls.

Details: The call links feature is stock standard - it's similar to the links you use to dial into Zoom and Google Meet. In addition to this launch, Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp is testing expanding the max size of group video calls to 32 people.

On a related note: Last month, Meta announced that WhatsApp Communities, a Slack workspace-style experience, was nearing full public launch.

Why it matters: On their own, the new links and larger group call features feel inconsequential. When considered together with WhatsApp's push on Communities, as well as the Salesforce partnership announced last week, they showcase WhatsApp's growing B2B ambition. 

With over 75 million active users in the US alone, WhatsApp has the potential to become a meaningful player in the business communications space.

Features & products hot off the press

Big tech

• Instagram starts testing a new nav bar that removes the shopping tab (XDA)

• Cloudflare unveils an eSIM and a security product for telcos (TechCrunch)

• Walmart launches two virtual worlds on Roblox (CNBC)

• Samsung gets into the credit card game in India (Reuters)

• Amazon will hold another Prime-exclusive sales event in October (EnGadget)  

• Fitbit users will require Google Accounts as early as next year (Verge)

General and early-stage

• Ancestry to identify which side of the family matches come from (Verge)

• Substack launches a new web-based RSS reader (Substack)

• Cruise ditches NVIDIA to make its own self-driving vehicle chips (EnGadget)

• Rec Room unveils a Unity-powered suite of tools for its creators (VentureBeat)

• Stock AI augments its stock photo marketplace with generative AI (StockAI)

Getting 1% better at building product

• Prioritization - Grasping the right product path ahead (RunTheBusiness)

• Freemium - How to decide what to give away in a freemium product (@lennysan) 

Other tech happenings

• AI is legit. An artist receives the first US copyright registration for latent diffusion AI art (Arstechnica)

• Gaming & chill. Netflix launches an internal game studio to dive deeper into mobile gaming (TechCrunch)

• Project demand gen. Hugging Face and Service Now launch a project to open-source code-generating AI systems (TechCrunch)

• Mixin' it up. Apple diversifies away from China by manufacturing iPhone 14's in India (TechCrunch)

• Crypto KYC. CFTC begins a push to require DeFi companies to tie identities to transactions (Axios)

Courtesy of mindless Twitter scrolling

@colin_dunn

@villaumbrosia

@jasonfried

And that’s a wrap for today. Stay tuned for more!

-  Amol

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