AI chatbots have become so popular in the last year as it impressed users with its capabilities. Some are even advanced enough to write code for you. Instagram might be adding its own chatbot soon as well, but it will do so with unique features.
Customize Your Own AI Chatbot
The photo-centric app hasn't announced the feature yet, but it looks like Instagram is working on an "AI Friend" that lets you customize various aspects that will affect its behavior. Upon creation, users can converse with them and talk about various topics.
The potential feature was spotted by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi. The chatbot is not as advanced as Copilot or ChatGPT, but you can chat with the AI to brainstorm ideas, talk through challenges, and even provide answers to your questions, as reported by Tech Crunch.
As for customization, during the creation process of the AI, you'll be presented with choices to build the chatbot and give it the kind of personality and interests that you prefer. You can choose its gender, whether it's female, male, or non-binary.
#Instagram is working on the ability to create an #AI friend 👀 pic.twitter.com/onAxGfGdSg
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) October 30, 2023
There are also options for age as well as you choose between Young, Adult, and Elderly. It's still unclear how this will contribute to the customized AI's outcome, but you can choose an ethnicity for it such as African American, Asian, Caucasian, Indian, Latin/Hispanic, Mixed, and more.
The way it will respond to your prompts or questions will depend on the personality you pick for it. The screenshot shows that you can choose up to two personality traits from choices like Reserved, Enthusiastic, Creative, Witty, Pragmatic, and Empowering.
Just as you can add interests to your Facebook profile, you can also determine the interests your custom AI has. There are several choices available such as DIY, Animals, Art & Design, Food, Education, Gaming, Music, Nature, Reading, and more.
After that, there are only a few steps left before you can eventually converse with the custom chatbot. All you have to do is name it and assign an avatar. We are yet to see if this fares well in the app, especially since Snapchat's own chatbot wasn't much of a hit for its users.
Snapchat Users Hated the App's Chatbot
Instagram isn't the first social media app that wants to include a chatbot within the platform. Snapchat added its own AI feature called "My AI," and it was met with negative feedback from users. Initially, the feature was only available to Snapchat's premium service.
It was eventually rolled out even to on-paying users, but it wasn't received the way the company was expecting. People were complaining about the feature, so much so that a lot of them left one-star reviews for Snapchat in app stores.
This caused the app's average rating to drop to 1.67 stars, as reported by 9To5Mac. It was a problem mostly because of the fact that users didn't have the option to remove the feature. They can only do so if they are subscribers to Snapchat+.
