AI has been on a steady rise since the tech world saw its potential and developed the technology to more advanced models. One of the services that has emerged since then is chatbots, with the most popular services like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Soon, Instagram will have its own.
Instagram's AI Chatbot
Chatbots can be useful as it provides users with an advanced interactive assistant. As it is improved, chatbots are becoming more and more capable of responding and performing complex tasks given by a user via text prompts.
Given that tech companies have already integrated AI chatbots in their services such as Microsoft and Google search engines as well as Snapchat, other tech companies are looking into the possibility as well, and Meta is among those.
Alessandro Paluzzi, a reverse engineer who is also known for spotting upcoming features for other platforms, posted a screenshot on Twitter, stating that Instagram is working on AI agents, also known as AI bots, as mentioned in Engadget.
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) June 5, 2023
The AI chatbot will be able to answer the users' questions as well as offer advice. More than that, people will be able to choose from 30 different personalities. According to Paluzzi's tweet, the chatbot helps users who find it difficult to write messages.
The screenshot also shows that people will be able to add the chatbot to a conversation on Facebook Messenger. A user can do so by mentioning the AI to tag them into the conversation. For example, the user should type "@ai," although it's still unclear what its function will be.
There is still no news as to when this would be launched, and although it is likely, there's still no confirmation when the feature would be added. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg already did say that the company already had a team working on "AI personas."
Whether it will be received well is still up for debate. ChatGPT has a great track record when it comes to user experience. Companies are even using it to take over jobs. Snapchat, however, did not get the reaction they were hoping for.
People Hated Snapchat's Chatbot
People expressed their disappointment with Snapchat's "My AI" chatbot by flooding its ratings with one-star reviews, eventually leading to the app getting a rating of 1.67 stars. Around 75% of the reviews were one-star.
One of the reasons that people hated it was because there was no option for the users to remove the chatbot unless they were subscribed to Snapchat+. Initially, the feature was only available to premium subscribers, as mentioned in 9To5Mac.
The chatbot is powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT, so people may expect that Snapchat users would be excited about it only for it to result in the opposite. Although, unlike ChatGPT, My AI is capable of adopting a nickname provided by the user.
Until now, Snapchat still hasn't included an option where non-premium users can remove the AI bot. If Instagram does add an AI chatbot, hopefully, it would not end up as Snapchat did where users would rather remove the chatbot than use it.
