AI Characters to Enhance User Engagement and Competition
As early as September, Meta social networks, including Facebook and Instagram, will feature multifunctional “characters” — virtual personalities created by artificial intelligence that will help platform users in searching, getting recommendations, and other ways of interacting with services. This is reported by the Financial Times, citing sources in the company.
Chatbots on social networks will imitate various real and abstract personalities: one will impersonate a surfer, and the second will portray Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln). An exciting new feature will increase the competitiveness of the Meta platforms on several fronts at once. On the one hand, it will deal a blow to TikTok and help increase user engagement. On the other hand, the company will be able to fully demonstrate its achievements in AI, which promise to be no worse than analogues from OpenAI and Google.
Meta’s AI Integration Journey and Early Discoveries
The company first announced its intentions to integrate AI functions into its social networks back in February, and in June it clarified that one of the innovations would be AI characters that would play entertaining and auxiliary roles – then it was said that chat bots would be useful primarily in messengers. At the same time, application researcher Alessandro Paluzzi found in the preliminary version of Instagram the “Communicate with AI” feature, a chatbot that can answer questions and give advice in the style of different personalities. The function will also help users in writing publications.
Unveiling AI Ambitions at the Connect Developer Event
The company is expected to elaborate on its AI intentions at the Connect developer event in September, notes NIX Solutions. Communicating with chatbots, the Financial Times notes, will also help Meta collect more data about users’ interests, which means it can more accurately target ads. Something similar has already been implemented by Snapchat, its own ChatGPT-based chatbot My AI.