Snapchat’s My AI chatbot is no longer exclusive to Snapchat+ users and it’s now available free for all of Snapchat’s 750 million monthly users. This move comes less than two months after the OpenAI-powered bot was first made available to the app’s more than 3 million paid subscribers.
My AI is also becoming a more integral part of Snapchat. It can now be added to group chats by mentioning it with an @ symbol, and Snap will let people change the look and name of their bot with a custom Bitmoji avatar. In addition, My AI can now recommend AR filters to use in Snapchat’s camera or places to visit from the app’s map tab. And Snap plans to soon let people visually message My AI and receive generated responses; an example shown during the company’s annual conference today showed a photo of tomatoes in a garden, prompting the bot to respond with a generated image of gazpacho soup.
While Microsoft and Google are racing to integrate generative AI into their search engines, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sees the technology as “an awesome creative tool.” During a recent interview, he shared personal examples of using My AI to create bedtime stories for his children and plan a birthday itinerary for his wife, Miranda Kerr. More than 2 million chats per day are already happening with My AI, he says.
Spiegel also remains tight-lipped about My AI’s potential impact on Snap’s advertising business, which has faced considerable growth challenges. He acknowledges that leveraging My AI’s interactions for ad targeting could be an opportunity but refrains from elaborating further, hinting at possible developments in the near future.
“Just based on the way that they work, I think they’re much more suited to creative tasks,” Spiegel says of generative AI bots. “And some of the things that make them so creative are also the things that make them not so great at recalling specific information.”
There’s a debate raging in the AI industry about whether companies should anthropomorphize chatbots with human personas. According to Spiegel, the ability to change My AI’s name and customize its appearance was one of the top requests from early users. “To me, that just speaks to the human desire to personalize things and make them feel like they’re their own.”
