Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said the company’s embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) can up its advertising game.
Spiegel spoke about the progress of the social media platform’s My AI chatbot Tuesday (June 20) at a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) event in France, WSJ reported.
“My AI definitely helps provide a privacy-safe intent signal,” he said, per the report. “When people are communicating with My AI, we can then use those insights to help improve recommendations across our platform.”
Spiegel said around 150 million people have used the chatbot since its launch earlier this year, sending more than 10 billion messages, including 5 million messages about McDonald’s and “tens of millions of conversations about cars and recommendations about what car to buy,” according to the report.
The news comes as Snapchat is seeing brands reduce their ad spending on its platform.
The company’s quarterly earnings report in April reflected the effect of these pullbacks. Snapchat reported its first-ever decline in quarterly revenue, 7%, to $988.6 million for the first quarter of 2023, versus $1 billion during the same period the previous year.
Snapchat debuted My AI in February as a premium service and announced in April that the tool was being rolled out to users around the world.
It’s one of many social media platforms embracing AI as the technology grows in popularity. For example, TikTok announced last month it was testing Tako, an AI-powered chatbot that helps users seek out content.
Last week, Meta Platforms introduced Voicebox, a generative AI model that helps with tasks such as audio editing, sampling and styling.
“Voicebox can produce high-quality audio clips and edit pre-recorded audio — like removing car horns or a dog barking — all while preserving the content and style of the audio,” Meta said at the time. “The model is also multilingual and can produce speech in six languages.”
The tool’s capabilities include text-to-speech generation using audio samples as short as two seconds, recreating portions of speech for editing and noise reduction, and producing a reading of text in a person’s voice in English, French, German, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese.
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