Discord wants you to message a chatbot alongside your gamer pals, by turning its Clyde bot into a full-fledged AI chatterbox with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPTtechnology.
Starting next week, you’ll be able to summon the chatbot in select servers (Discord’s take on group chatrooms) by typing @Clyde. The digital helper’s robot icon will then appear to help answer questions and engage in conversations with you and your pals.
You’ll also be able to ask Clyde to start a thread for a group of your friends to hang out, recommend playlists, and fetch GIFs and emojis. Initially, the chatbot will only be accessible on a limited number of servers, but Discord is promising to make it more widely available soon.
Previously, Clyde was just another drone among the many bots on Discord that could automate everyday tasks on a server. Among their abilities, bots can be used to welcome new members, ban miscreants, or share music, memes, and other fun stuff.
OpenAI is quickly becoming the go-to white-label service for chatbots thanks to the popularity of its GPT-3.5 large-language model, which is the same system that underpins the company’s ChatGPT tool.
Microsoft, Snapchat, and Slack owner Salesforce are all harnessing the company’s tech to power chatbots on their respective platforms.
Still, it begs the question: Do all of these services really need a chatbot? In Discord and Snap’s case, there is a risk the bots will be ignored by users who are busy chatting to their pals.
Nevertheless, Discord is diving into AI in an effort to help ease moderation for users who run their own servers. The company is also using OpenAI’s large-language model to make its AutoMod AI smarter.
Alongside blocking unwanted messages, the system can now find and alert the moderator whenever server rules may have been broken, keeping in “mind” the context of a conversation. As with Clyde, Discord is testing out the new AutoMod on a limited number of servers.
In addition, you’ll be able to access AI-generated conversation summaries to help you catch up with things you missed on some servers, where the chatter often comes thick and fast.
Discord is also letting developers play with new AI tools that will allow you to remix your avatar using generative-image models. It’s also developing a shared whiteboard that will let you and your pals turn doodles into photo-realistic images using the magic of an AI-powered text-to-image generator.
In an effort to create more AI tools, Discord is launching an AI incubator for developers, with resources from the $5 million (£4.1 m) ecosystem fund it launched last autumn.
“We hope you’re getting the picture that AI is a technology we’re truly excited about,” Anjney Middha, VP of Platform Ecosystems at Discord, wrote in a blog post.
The updates follow the release of Discord voice chat on PS5, allowing players to speak to their mates on other consoles, the web, desktop, and mobile.
