Snap unveils My AI, Snapchat’s ChatGPT-powered chatbot

Microsoft’s aggressive AI investment alerted its competitors in the tech industry they needed to move forward on the same path. With this, after Google and Opera, Snap is now releasing its own chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

My AI is currently available only to Snapchat Plus subscribers, who pay $3.99 a month, as an experimental feature. It is accessible on Snapchat’s chat tab and is situated above your conversation threads with friends. As expected, it can answer questions and take requests from users using natural language. However, unlike Bing’s chatbot, My AI is designed differently to make it a friendly tool for Snap’s young customers.

While Bing’s chatbot answers web queries and generates code snippets or compositions, Snap’s My AI has limited capabilities. It can follow simple requests like providing gift ideas or recipes, but it cannot compose essays, which is a good thing since it is the reason why the original ChatGPT chatbot is restricted in some educational institutions.

My AI is trained on the company’s trust and safety guidelines and designed to prevent the generation of foul opinions and responses. Nonetheless, Snap is still in the process of refining the bot. The company is doing it by regularly making tweaks and adjustments based on the reports it receives from current users, especially when the bot provides offensive responses. This is just necessary, nonetheless, since a considerable number of Snapchat’s community population is made of young users. And given that Snap plans to release My AI to everyone on Snapchat, perfecting it should it one of its main priorities to prevent the same consequences being faced by Microsoft now.

Snap is not the first company to inject AI into a messaging app. Prior to this announcement, Microsoft also revealed the integration of ChatGPT into its Skype service, making it an assistant-like persona in the platform capable of handling different requests and commands. In 2016, Google also attempted to do it through Allo, an instant messaging mobile app. However, AI tech was not that advanced then, resulting in the death of this Google’s project in March 2019. On a positive note, 2023 is the start of a new era for more advanced AI, giving Snap the hope that My AI is a worthy feature to invest in.