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Forget Twitter — this social media app has ChatGPT built-in

Koo, a social media app developed in India that pushes itself as a Twitter replacement, is deploying ChatGPT smarts to prop its appeal. The company says Koo is the “first microblogging platform in the world” to integrate ChatGPT to boost the creative flow. Koo follows in the footsteps of Snapchat in deploying ChatGPT for some cutting-edge AI bragging rights.

At the moment, the ChatGPT integration is only available to creators with a sizeable following or those with a verified badge. However, it will soon be available for everyone without any follower count restriction. So far, the company hasn’t said anything about charging users for the feature, or whether it might be moved to a premium tier in the near future, considering the fact that OpenAI’s viral tool is embracing the API route for commercial usage.

chatGPT integration into Koo
Koo

Aside from text prompts, Koo users can also use the voice dictation feature to interact with the AI. The draft section of Koo app will let users accomplish tasks like “finding the top news of the day or asking for a quote from a well-known personality or even asking for the post or a blog to be written.” The latter is worrisome, which I’ve briefly discussed below. There’s also some precedent for that out there with apps like Paragraph AI doing everything from generating content in various styles to taking over even your messaging app conversations.

Koo is pushing itself as a Twitter alternative and says it has accumulated over 50 million downloads … but hasn’t disclosed the number of users. However, it looks like the Koo is trying to boost its appeal by recruiting the hottest new tool on the internet, one that will also be immensely convenient to churn out human-like thoughtful content in bulk — which is again the easy route to grabbing more eyeballs.

The diminishing human touch

Robots using smartphones
Dall-E / OpenAI

Social media is inherently a place for communication, but over the years, it has blossomed into a content juggernaut that is driving billions in revenue. And it’s not solely multimedia content like videos that are pulling in serious money, but it’s also text-based content (such as threads as well as newsletters) that is attracting some sizeable revenue.

With generative AI tools like ChatGPT coming into the picture, it is only a matter of time before text content generated using ChatGPT will flood social media platforms. The likes of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are already brimming with AI-generated artwork and videos. Worryingly, with tools like ChatGPT, even the barrier of copy-paste will vanish.

Social media platforms — despite all their perils like hate speech, harassment, and outright misinformation — are still a place where one can marvel at the results of human creativity. Be it jokes, puns, or just some good old-fashioned commentary, we at least get a few chuckles at the result of real human ingenuity.

With creators churning out content using ChatGPT — as Koo is advertising — it seems we are entering a new age of social media where it would be nigh impossible to discern if the joke you are laughing at is a human creation or AI-generated. For the latter scenario, it seems like a deception to me, especially if such content is shared without explicit disclosure.

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Nadeem Sarwar
Nadeem is a tech journalist who started reading about cool smartphone tech out of curiosity and soon started writing…
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT app is free for iPhone and iPad
The ChatGPT website on an iPhone.

OpenAI has just launched a free ChatGPT app for iOS, giving iPhone and iPad owners an easy way to take the AI-powered tool for a spin.

The new app, which is able to converse in a remarkably human-like way, is available now in the U.S. App Store and will come to additional countries “in the coming weeks,” OpenAI said. Android users are promised their own ChatGPT app “soon.”

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Forget ChatGPT — Siri and Google Assistant do these 4 things better
AI assistants compared with ChatGPT.

“Hey Google, Arbab!” I utter these lines to Google Assistant, which automatically takes me to my Twitter DMs with my friend Arbab. That chain of actions happens because I customized one such shortcut for Google Assistant on my phone. Putting the same prompt before ChatGPT, I get the predictably disappointing response: "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to personal contact information such as phone numbers or email addresses.”

That’s just one of the dozen walls that you will run into if you seek to embrace ChatGPT while simultaneously ditching mainstream options like Google Assistant. One wonders why ChatGPT – considered by evangelists as the pinnacle of a consumer-facing AI in 2023 – fails miserably at something as fundamental as sending a message.

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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.

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