AI chatbots are becoming increasingly prevalent, with more and more companies launching their own versions of artificial intelligence services. Now, it’s the turn of the picture-sharing app Snapchat.
The company announced that its new chatbot, called ‘My AI’, would be ‘an experimental, friendly, chatbot’ designed to be a ‘personal sidekick’ to Snapchat users.
The service has been developed alongside Open AI, the company behind the increasingly popular ChatGPT software, adapted for Snapchat.
It was originally only available to to the Snapchat’s three million paid subscribers – but the company announced at its annual developer conference that it is now being rolled out to all of the app’s 750 million monthly users for free.
Snapchat has warned that the rollout of the service is slow, so you might not have access just yet.
The company has said that My AI has a wide variety of uses and ‘is there to help and to connect you more deeply to the people and things you care about most.’
You can access it by swiping right from the Camera screen to open the My AI Chat screen and give it a try.
Similar to ChatGPT, users can ask it factual questions, request creative content, and have back-and-forth conversations with the service.
It can also be added to group chats by mentioning it with an @ symbol.
The app listed some examples of tasks it can help with as:
- Answering a burning trivial question
- Offering advice on the perfect gift for your BFF’s birthday
- Helping to plan a hiking trip for a long weekend
- Suggesting what to make for dinner
My AI can also recommend AR filters to use in Snapchat’s camera or places to visit from the app’s map tab.
Snap plans to soon let people visually message My AI and receive generated responses.
You can personalise your interactions with My AI by giving it a nickname and telling it about your likes and dislikes.
All of your interactions with the chatbot are stored until you delete them, but you can hide messages sent to My AI within 24 hours or delete your entire My AI Chat history.
During a recent interview, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said he uses My AI to create bedtime stories for his children and plan a birthday itinerary for his wife, Miranda Kerr.
However, the picture-sharing app offers some heavy caveats about My AI’s abilities, warning that it may answer incorrectly, be unsure of its answers, and even provide a biased response to an inquiry.
My AI was criticised for being inappropriate for young users when it was released in March.
In tests run by the Washington Post, the bot gave advice to a reporter pretending to be 12-years-old about how to plan a ‘surprise trip’ with their ’30-year-old boyfriend’ where they intended to have sex for the first time.
Now that the paid trial period is over and it’s being rolled out to all users, Snap’s vice president of product, Jack Brody, says the app will be more careful about providing age-appropriate advice.
‘This early phase of the rollout has allowed us to address some of the challenges that have come up, like adding age awareness.
‘In 99.5% of cases, its responses do conform to our community guidelines.’
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