Snap has entered into an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to power generative AI experiences within Snapchat's My AI chatbot, which will leverage the multimodal capabilities of Google's Gemini AI to understand different types of information, including text, voice, images and video.
Gemini joins the Google Lens-like features Snapchat announced last week at the company's annual Snap Partner Summit. For example, users can ask Snap's My AI to translate a photo of a foreign road sign or ask a chatbot to choose the healthiest option on a menu.
Snap first launched My AI in February 2023. At launch, the chatbot was powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Now, the company is leveraging Google's generative AI models to enable the chatbot to process images, videos, and text as well.
In a statement, Google said that after integrating Snapchat into Gemini and My AI, it saw chatbot engagement increase by more than 2.5 times in the U.S.
“This partnership with Google Cloud strengthens everything that matters to us in serving our community,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in a press release. “At Snap, our goal is to help people express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. With Gemini in My AI, Snapchatters can now learn more about the world, act on it super quickly in the moment, and easily share it with their friends.”
Today's announcement builds on a partnership between Snap and Google Cloud that spans more than a decade.
It makes sense for Snapchat to invest in new AI features, given that competitors are doing the same, but there are already concerns about the potential risks that My AI poses to users, especially children, and making the chatbot even smarter could increase those risks.