by Colin Kirkland
Source: www.mediapost.com, September 2024
In an effort to further boost its AI functionality, Snapchat is expanding its in-app chatbot by partnering with Google. From now on, My AI will be powered by Google’s Gemini AI system, marking a move away from its sole integration with OpenAI’s GPT models.
In a video Snap posted on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel highlights Snap’s decision to expand upon the company’s decade-long partnership with the Google Cloud to now back its My AI chatbot feature.
“By partnering with Google, we can leverage the multimodal capability of Gemini to understand what’s going on in a Snap, even read the caption, and reply,” Siegel says, taking a photo of a wall of snacks, asking My AI what the healthiest option is, and reading the chatbot’s response: “Kind bars.”
Gemini AI will enable Snapchat’s chatbot to understand different types of information, including text, audio, images, and videos.
My AI first launched in February of last year as a new best friend for premium Snap subscribers — a chatbot that users could ask questions to and receive answers powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology.
However, the feature attracted criticism in its early days due to its infringement on users’ private messaging and its propensity to track users’ locations via the Snap Map.
The feature has since addressed these issues and rolled out to all users as a free offering.
As for the shift away from OpenAI, Spiegel mentions that in addition to Gemini’s multimodal functionality, the benefits of Gemini’s multilingual capabilities also work to better serve Snapchat’s global audience — about 750 million monthly active users — as the Snap CEO instructs My AI to translate a written message into French.
In an announcement, Google said that following Snapchat’s integration of Gemini into My AI, the chatbot saw over 2.5 times as much engagement within the United States.
Until now, OpenAI has been the main leader in AI chatbots and large language models, revolutionizing the industry and inciting debate across the globe about the future of AI. But over the past year, other tech giants such as Meta and Google have invested heavily in developing their own large language models, diversifying the space.
While it is still unclear whether Snapchat is leaving OpenAI behind entirely, the company’s partnership with Gemini demonstrates new opportunities in AI integrations.
