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We're entering a new era of anticipatory customer experience – one that's not just reactive, not just responsive, but truly predictive. In this new model, systems don't wait for friction to appear; they recognise signals early and step in before the user ever feels a slowdown or moment of uncertainty. The bar has shifted: customers now expect brands to predict their needs and act before friction even surfaces.

Start a conversation on your laptop, finish it on your phone. The context just follows you. That’s what cross-device AI sync delivers. No reloading history, no reintroducing yourself, just one continuous thread across every screen. It builds trust, reduces friction, and makes the assistant feel like a single, persistent presence. This post unpacks why users expect it, what makes it technically tricky, and what your system needs to get it right.

Refresh the page, lose signal, switch tabs - the AI conversation just keeps going. That’s what reliable, resumable token streaming makes possible. No restarts, no lost context, just the same response picking up right where it left off. It keeps users in flow and builds trust, making conversations feel seamless. Even better, it unlocks things like switching devices mid-stream without missing a beat.

Ably AI Transport is now in early access. It gives your AI the continuity, awareness, and multi-device reliability users actually expect. Drop it in, keep your existing stack, and start shipping Gen-2 AI right away.

Live streaming has evolved from a novelty to the backbone of modern digital events. When major brands host virtual conferences, product launches, or community gatherings, they're no longer dealing with hundreds of viewers – they're managing tens of thousands of concurrent participants, all expecting to engage in realtime chat. We recently worked with a team building live chat for a major creative software company's annual event.

For several hours in the day, millions of users were staring at loading screens or frozen apps. Communication channels went quiet. Games, financial platforms, healthcare apps – and even beds – were all down. The culprit this time: an outage in Amazon Web Services' us-east-1 region. AWS is the dominant provider of cloud compute globally, and us-east-1 is its oldest and busiest region. Countless businesses globally depend day-to-day on services hosted in that region.

During this week’s AWS us-east-1 outage, Ably maintained full service continuity with no customer impact. This was our multi-region architecture working exactly as designed; error rates were negligibly low and unchanged throughout. Any additional round trip latency was limited to 12ms, which is below the typical variance in any client-to-endpoint connection, and well below our 40–50ms global median; this is imperceptible to users and below monitoring thresholds.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Annotations in Ably Pub/Sub, a powerful way to enrich your realtime streams with structured, abstracted data. Annotations let you layer context onto messages, from emojis and read receipts to custom tags and beyond. Think of them as stickers of information you can attach to messages, tracking and aggregating them however you need.

We're excited to announce that we've expanded the moderation capabilities for Ably Chat by introducing two new moderation providers: Bodyguard, Tisane. This enhancement builds upon our recent launch of Moderation for Ably Chat, designed to ensure safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable chat experiences for all users. With these new providers, you now have greater flexibility when choosing which moderation service best fits the needs of your community.