Snapchat's parent company Snap is expanding its suite of AI tools for creators.
At this year's Snap Partner Summit in Santa Monica, Calif., Snap announced Easy Lens, a new feature that turns plain English descriptions into Snap-branded Lenses – augmented reality (AR) objects, 3D effects, characters and transformations for photos and videos. Available through Snap's developer platform, Lens Studio, Easy Lens uses a generative AI model to parse what's written and automatically builds a Lens using Lens Studio components.
Among other features in Lens Studio, Snap is rolling out Body Morph, a generative tool for creating 3D characters, costumes and outfits from text captions and reference images. Lens Studio will also introduce an image generator to create icons for Lenses. There are also hundreds of animations for Bitmoji, Snapchat's personalized emojis, which can be stitched together using new blending features.
Image credit: Snap
Snap says it plans to add even more generative features to Lens Studio in the future, including a custom animation generator and a tool that allows creators to upload videos of objects to Lens Studio and have the software reconstruct the object as a 3D asset.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel stressed in a recent memo that the company is investing heavily in generative AI and continues to see the technology as “transformative” across Snap's various properties. Indeed, Spiegel argued that generative AI is a big driver of growth for Snap's creators.
Image credit: Snap
“Our AI Lenses are already among the most used lenses on Snapchat, and our on-device models let us further extend these experiences with faster generation and lower cost,” Spiegel wrote. “This year, we'll further improve identity preservation for generative Snaps, enable generative video experiences, and have even more opportunities to help people reinterpret and reimagine their photos.” [Snapchat] “Memories in a new way.”
Snap said the number of creators publishing lenses has grown from 330,000 in November to 375,000 as of this month, while the number of lenses across Snapchat, its website, mobile apps and Snap's augmented reality glasses, Spectacles, has grown from 3.5 million to 4 million in the same period.
Image credit: Snap
Snap is under pressure to turn things around: Its third-quarter profit fell short of expectations, largely due to a weak advertising market (from which Snap derives almost all of its revenue), and in one day in August, the company's stock price plummeted, wiping more than $4.6 billion from its market cap.
In addition to exploring new avenues for generative AI across its products, Spiegel said in the memo that Snap plans to test several new ad formats and a “lightweight version” of the Snapchat app to drive interest from advertisers.