At the end of February, Snapchat announced the launch of a chatbot for its social app: My AI, an AI based on the popular ChatGPT. The chatbot was integrated into Snapchat’s chat tab, although it could only be used by those who paid for Snapchat Plus, the app’s subscription service.
Now, all that is changing, and Snapchat has announced that it will launch its chatbot for all users of the app and completely free of charge. The announcement, echoed by The Verge, comes at a time when My AI is becoming an essential pillar of Snapchat.
Following its latest updates, Snapchat users can add the AI to group chats by mentioning it with their @, so that it participates as one more, in addition to recommending augmented reality filters when using Snapchat’s camera or places to visit when using the app’s maps tab.
In the short-medium term, Snapchat will allow users to change the look and name of their chatbots with a custom Bitmoji avatar, and will also give the ability to send requests with images to My AI for it to “read”, interpret and generate an automated response related to their content (in the style of OpenAI’s GPT-4).
Snapchat wants to differentiate itself from other companies that already have their own AI, such as Microsoft and Google, and use its chatbot for creative work, rather than as a search engine. So says Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, who sees this technology as “an incredible creative tool”.
“Just because of the way they work, I think they’re much better suited for creative tasks,” Spiegel says of generative chatbots. “And some of the things that make them so creative are also the things that make them not so good at remembering specific information.”
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