WhatsApp is seemingly testing a new look that brings AI front and center to the messaging app, as first discovered byWABetaInfo. The new look, as seen on a beta version of the Android app, gives AI its own tab and is clearly aimed at encouraging users to play with Meta’s many AI tools.
The WABetaInfo team found the AI tab lists features such as “Popular AI characters” you can chat with and bots organized by topic, like a bizarre dinner party where everyone’s a robot. There are also AI-generated stickers, images, and a Meta AI-powered search engine.
If these sound familiar, that’s because these AI tools already exist in WhatsApp – you just may not have noticed them, because they’re buried under the Chats tab. This redesign looks to make AI more visible and, presumably, more used. Whether that happens is anyone’s guess, but Meta seems to be betting on AI being the next big thing in messaging. The changes also affect the Communities tab, which no longer has its own space and which will instead live within the Chats tab.
AI WhatsApp
WABetaInfo also found that Meta is experimenting with custom AI bots that users can design within WhatsApp. By baking this feature into WhatsApp, Meta is making it more convenient than turning to the AI Studio in Instagram, though it’s still unclear how many people actually want to build their own chatbots. They may prefer the pre-built ones provided by the platform or to just chat with actual humans.
The upcoming changes to WhatsApp fit with Meta’s efforts to embed AI in all of its platforms, particularly in encouraging the use of the Meta AI assistant. If it can entice even a small portion of the more than two billion WhatsApp users to start engaging with its AI products, Meta will be thrilled.
It does somewhat go against WhatsApp’s streamlined and simple style, but that may not matter if people want to use AI for whatever purpose. Still, there’s a fine line between enhancing a platform and overloading it, and Meta is balancing right on that line.
There’s no date for the revamp, though the beta-testing suggests a wait of a few months is likely. That said, if the integration of ChatGPT on WhatsApp proves as popular as OpenAI hopes, you might see the AI-focused WhatsApp come out even sooner than that and be copied across Meta’s whole ecosystem.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
