Skip to main content

Instagram now lets you video chat with up to three buddies

Instagram

It’s a busy time for Instagram just now. Right after launching IGTV, it’s now introduced video chat in Instagram Direct that lets you chinwag with a single buddy or several at once.

“Video chat gives you the experience of real-time video in a private space and helps you feel close and connected to friends when you can’t be together,” the Facebook-owned company said in a post on Tuesday, June 26.

The feature lets you connect with all of your Instagram friends whether they’re using an iOS or Android device, and unlike some chat and messaging services, you don’t need a phone number to get started. So long as you have an active Direct thread with them, you’re good to go.

To begin a video chat, swipe into your Direct inbox and open any message thread. See the camera icon in the top right corner? Tap it to initiate a call.

During a chat, you can minimize the video and do other stuff on the Instagram app like sending messages and photos in Direct, checking your feed, posting a story, and so on.

The new feature lets up to four people chat at a time, with each participant given their own space on the display so you can all see each other.

“If there’s an active video chat in a group thread, the camera icon will turn blue,” Instagram says. “Simply tap the camera to join in the fun.”

If you want to leave an active chat among friends or end the call if it’s with one other person, then tap the red phone icon at the bottom of the display.

Don’t want to receive a chat request from someone? Just block them to prevent calls. It’s also possible to mute an individual if you’d prefer not to receive notifications from them. To confirm your video chat notification settings, tap the gear icon on your profile and you’ll find the new video chat control in Push Notifications.

Explore and camera effects

Instagram has also given some attention to the Explore tab, retaining its style but adding new topic channels along the top to help you surface content of interest. You can move quickly between the different topics by swiping the entire grid.

Finally, Instagram’s 1 billion users can also have fun with some new camera effects designed by Ariana Grande, BuzzFeed, Liza Koshy, Baby Ariel, and the NBA.

Introducing video chat takes Instagram another step away from its roots as a simple photo-sharing app, but with people now so used to having social media apps packed with features, the team behind it calculates that this latest one will prove a hit. It should certainly achieve its main aim of keeping users within the app for longer, eliminating the need to hop out to a competitor to initiate a call. Launching with a group video option is also important, as the likes of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat already offer such a feature. Apple’s FaceTime will begin offering group video chats with iOS 12 when it launches in the fall.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
These are the 10 most-viewed YouTube videos of all time
The red and white YouTube logo on a phone screen. The phone is on a white background.

Being popular is about the only thing the current most-viewed YouTube videos have in common with their top-performing predecessors. Even though YouTube videos like Chocolate Rain went viral during the first few years of YouTube's content, they probably wouldn't be among the kinds of videos that go viral on the platform now.

In fact, children's programming and music videos are now among the most-viewed content on YouTube. Music videos, in particular, have enjoyed great success on the streaming site and, until recently, had been the majority of the most-viewed videos in YouTube's history. Music videos still account for 40% of the top 10 most-viewed videos, however. The other 60% is content for young children. If these view counts are anything to go by, the video-sharing site could be considered a leading platform for music videos and kid-friendly content, rather than just the memeworthy viral videos the site was known for in its early days.
What is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time?
Baby Shark Dance is the most-viewed video ever on YouTube. The children's song overtook the all-Spanish version of Despacito in November 2020.
What are the top 10 most-viewed YouTube videos?

Read more
You can now video chat with a ChatGPT AI — here’s what it looks like
Call Annie ChatGPT app on an iPhone.

Showing up to a videoconference as your digital avatar can be quite fun. Apple lets you do just that with Memojis during FaceTime. If you want something more ambitious on a different platform, Avatarify will turn into Albert Einstien or Mona Lisa for Zoom calls. But what if you could bring an AI conversation to life? Say, by talking to ChatGPT as if OpenAI’s AI was a CGI person talking to you on a video call?
Well, that’s now possible. Call Annie is an app that turns ChatGPT into Annie, a talking female avatar that doesn’t look like a glitchy visual mess. Developed by Animato.Ai, the app is currently exclusive to iOS 16, but you can also use it on macOS 13 machines with an M-series processor inside.

A ChatGPT-powered video call in action
https://twitter.com/frantzfries/status/1651316031762071553?s=20
Another limitation is that you need at least the iPhone 12 or a later model to start a video call with Annie because the real-time conversion of linguistic prompts into visual cues draws power from Apple’s Neural Engine.
The app’s makers claim that talking to Annie “face-to-face in real time time feels more natural and faster than typing and reading text.” So far, the sample videos we have seen on social media, like the one above, show a fairly convincing video call interface.
Right now, Annie appears to be pretty good at holding a fluent conversation, even though the voice sounds robotic, and the phrase pausing could also use some work. The answers, however, are typical of the answers you would get while texting back-and-forth with ChatGPT. And given enough time and improved voice training, Call Annie interactions can become a lot more natural-sounding.
It all brings back memories of the sci-fi flick Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with one such AI. One user asked on Reddit whether Annie can have a “memory” system that will turn it into a smarter “friend,” to which the app developers replied with “soon.”
https://twitter.com/jakedahn/status/1651285054591750144
This is only the beginning for Annie
Users who have tried the app note that it occasionally flubs the pronunciation of words, but once corrected, it also learns right away. One user described this experience as “scary stuff.”Another issue it has is with pronouncing words in languages other than English, something that the developers are trying to fix.
Thanks to its ChatGPT smarts, the app’s developers say it can help you with everything from learning and web searches to serving as a tour guide or even a virtual companion. We don’t know if it’s as smart as other virtual partner apps like Replika, but considering the fact that Annie is based on ChatGPT (and its vast data training model), you can have a significantly deeper and fact-driven conversation with Annie.
Animato’s App Store description notes that the AI keeps all conversations “confidential” but hasn’t specified what kind of security measures have been put in place and whether it uses the user conversations for training and refining Annie’s systems.

Read more
Instagram finally lets you add multiple links to your bio
3D Instagram icon.

Instagram has finally relented and now offers a simple way to add multiple links to your profile. Before now, you could only have one link in your profile, but on Tuesday, the platform started allowing up to five.

But take note: The links won’t show individually. Instead, only one will appear on your profile, with the others accessible via a link.

Read more