Snap Inc. deepened its push into AI and AR on Wednesday, the latest tech company to go all-in on the industry’s hottest technology.
Headlining the news at its annual partner summit, Snap
SNAP,
said its artificial intelligence chatbot will now be able to respond to users’ messages with a fully AI-generated image as the company attempts to accelerate development of augmented reality (AR) features.
The company’s chatbot, called My AI, was built using startup OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
is a major investor in OpenAI.
According to Snap, My AI is now free to all Snapchat users. The chatbot was first rolled out to users who pay $3.99 a month for the company’s premium subscription Snapchat+, which now has more than 3 million users. The company had announced 2.5 million users in February.
Snap also launched an AR Mirror product for retailers that lets customers immediately — and digitally — try on products in AR within the store.
“Snap continues to impress us with its product innovation prowess,” Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney said in a note late Wednesday. “The key focus for us remains whether Snap can sustainably grow its user engagement and recover some of the signal loss from [Apple Inc.’s
AAPL,
] ATT [App Tracking Transparency] to improve targeting and monetization.”
Snap is scheduled to announce quarterly results on April 27. Its stock, which is up 23% so far this year, was flat during Wednesday’s regular session.
