Fox Corporation’s Tubi TV video streaming service is rolling out a proprietary movie recommendation app called “Rabbit AI” in a beta test for iOS customers in the U.S., with other platforms to follow. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, currently available only to enterprise and other paying customers, Rabbit AI provides “a new way to navigate” Tubi’s library of more than 200,000 movies and TV episodes, “providing hyper-personalized recommendations based on the contextual meaning of the terms,” the company says. A Rabbit AI plugin for ChatGPT is also now available to OpenAI subscribers, Tubi says. Continue reading Tubi Chooses ChatGPT to Power Content Recommendations

YouTube announced a new AI-powered creator tool called Dream Screen and hinted at things to come at its annual Made on YouTube event last week. Rolling out on a test basis to select YouTube Shorts creators later this year, Dream Screen will generate “fantastic settings” for video backgrounds. YouTube says it will “eventually” allow creators to “instantly reimagine” their videos by typing an idea prompt that results in new content created with AI tools. The company also announced it will have AI-generated recommendations for video ideas and machine learning assistance with music track search. Continue reading YouTube Debuts AI Creator Tools for Shorts and Mobile Video

Spotify is adding a new tool called Showcase that lets artists promote their work in the app’s homepage feed. Showcase “appears as a mobile banner at the top of Spotify’s Home — the most visited place on Spotify, where millions of listeners come to decide what to listen to, resulting in billions of streams each day,” the streamer says, adding that “people who see a Showcase are 6x more likely to stream the promoted release.” The banners will carry labels indicating a recommendation is sponsored. The company is also launching a marketing tool called Songwriter Promo Cards to assist with discovery. Continue reading Spotify Lets Artists Pay to Get Home Feed Recommendations

TikTok had a high-profile at New York Fashion Week, courting the marketing departments of companies including Gucci, Madewell and H&M at a splashy event at the East Village restaurant Cathédrale, decorated with mannequins bedecked in TikTok-inspired togs and a video wall featuring the “little luxuries” touted by TikTok users. While TikTok has succeeded in making itself a mandatory advertising outlet for many brands, the Fashion Week outreach was part of the platform’s effort to transition to a sales platform in its own right as after a year of testing it finally rolls out TikTok Shop for all U.S. users. Continue reading TikTok Shop Rolls Out to U.S. Users Following Year of Testing

Financial software giant Intuit is adding a customer-facing AI assistant to work with individuals and small businesses. Intuit Assist is being integrated across Intuit products starting with TurboTax and expanding to QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp. Assist will be embedded across Intuit’s products via a common user interface, allowing customers to get personalized recommendations via contextual datasets. The generative AI assistant was built using Intuit’s Generative AI Operating System, a proprietary corporate model dubbed GenOS, launched in June. Intuit is working with OpenAI to accelerate GenAI app development on GenOS. Continue reading Intuit’s GenOS Spawns Its First Customer AI Product: ‘Assist’

YouTube has shared a video designed to demystify the algorithm that determines which Shorts get recommended, driving discovery and potential virality. Unlike TikTok and Instagram, YouTube didn’t reveal its top secrets by sharing specific details. In the Q&A presentation, Shorts Product Lead Todd Sherman answered frequently asked questions and emphasized the differences in how viewers consume content on Shorts versus YouTube. While the former involves swiping through hundreds of clips, flagship users are exposed to 10 or 20 videos and must proactively click or tap to play. Continue reading YouTube Unravels Shorts, Demystifying Discovery Algorithm

Amazon’s live-streaming video service Twitch has begun testing a vertical presentation it’s calling the “Discovery Feed” designed to make it easier for users to browse and find new content. The interactive gaming and entertainment platform is the latest to emulate TikTok’s flagship vertical scroll, joining recent converts YouTube, Reddit, Spotify and Amazon. Beginning this week, select users will be able to access the new viewing format, although initially it will be populated with horizontally-framed creator clips, Twitch says, explaining that the framing will switch to vertical “as the feed evolves.” Continue reading Twitch Is Testing New Vertical-Scroll Feed to Boost Discovery

Salesforce suggests “the retail industry is again on the precipice of major disruption” based on consumer adoption of artificial intelligence, which is being used to change shopping habits and inform purchases through things like personalization, browsing suggestions and recommendations based on past habits and visualizations. Other popular use cases include AI-generated marketing assets and customer service agents. Based on a study conducted in May and June of this year involving 2,400 shoppers and 1,125 retail decision makers, Salesforce notes that one in six shoppers, or 17 percent, have already used generative AI for “purchase inspiration.” Continue reading Salesforce: 17 Percent of Shoppers Have Used Generative AI

Spotify is rolling out its new Confidence software development product in private beta. Based on its learnings from more than 10 years of experience experimenting at scale, the company says Confidence aims to make it simple for teams to set up, run and analyze their own user tests so they can quickly perfect and productize ideas. “Whether it’s automatically coordinating simultaneous A/B tests or orchestrating the rollout of an AI recommendation system across mobile, desktop, and web, the platform we built scales experimentation best practices and capabilities,” Spotify explains, adding that it plans to make the technology available soon to all companies. Continue reading Spotify’s Confidence Development Platform Is in Private Beta

Meta Platforms is amping up its AI play, with plans to launch a suite of personality-driven chatbots as soon as next month. The company has been developing the series of artificially intelligent character bots with a goal of using them to boost engagement with its social media brands by making them available to have “humanlike discussions” on platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Internally dubbed “personas,” the chatbots simulate characters ranging from historical figures like Abraham Lincoln to a surfer dude that dispenses travel advice. Continue reading Meta Plans Personality-Driven Chatbots to Boost Engagement

Snapchat is rolling out a new feature for its premium Snapchat+ platform that enables users who send Snaps to My AI let the artificial intelligence know what they’re up to “receive a unique generative Snap back that keeps the conversation going” via My AI Snaps. The feature was previewed at the Snap Partner Summit in April as part of a larger push on AI updates, including the ability to invite the My AI chatbot to participate in group chats with friends and the ability to get AI Lens suggestions and place recommendations. In addition, the My AI chatbot — made free to all users this year — was updated to reply to users’ Snaps with a text-based response. Continue reading Snapchat+ Introduces ‘My AI Snaps’ for Chatbot Snap Backs

TikTok is floating a trial balloon of its own AI chatbot, named Tako, now testing in select markets. Tako invites users to ask questions about TikTok videos and is also designed to help with discovery and recommendations. Tako’s public testing was first reported by Israeli app intelligence firm Watchful. TikTok subsequently confirmed testing in the Philippines and said Tako tests were live in some other global markets, but said the chatbot is not yet deployed in the United States. Unlike Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Google’s Bard and Snap’s My AI, Tako seems hyperfocused on TikTok content. Continue reading TikTok Embraces AI with Tako Chatbot, Now in Limited Tests

Meta Platforms has published a new AI technology, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that the company claims can identify objects it hasn’t seen before. Acting on a text prompt, SAM will highlight items in a photo or video, picking out all the cats, for instance, or flowers. It can also execute other functions, such as generating a 3D construct using a single 2D image or extrapolating from things viewed in a mixed reality headset. Segment Anything can work in concert with other models, potentially minimizing the need for voluminous data sets for training. Continue reading New Meta AI Can Detect Objects It Has Not Been Trained On

Chat app Discord is expanding the use of artificial intelligence on its platform, including the addition of OpenAI technology to its chatbot and moderation features. Discord says it has 150 million users across 19 million interest groups, called “servers,” that dialogue using text, audio and video chat. Discord’s Midjourney text-to-image generation group is its largest community, with in excess of 13 million members. “Harnessed properly, AI can fundamentally enhance and empower genuine human connection,” Discord CEO Jason Citron said at a press event last week, heralding “the most exciting moments in technology emerging.” Continue reading Discord Integrates OpenAI Tech, Updates AI-Driven Features

Bipartisan support is growing in the Senate for changes to Section 230, the part of the Communications Decency Act that grants federal immunity to social media platforms and other tech giants for content users post on their sites. At a combative Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, lawmakers from both parties called for gutting major provisions of the legal liability shield, on which Big Tech has come to rely. Senators accused tech firms of putting profits over user safety and slammed the U.S. Supreme Court, which appeared to approach the matter with caution last month in Gonzalez v. Google. Continue reading Senate Message to Big Tech Is Expect Reform to Section 230