Historically, third-party search engines have played a major role in helping users find information on Reddit. It’s common for people to search for Reddit posts via Google by adding the word Reddit to the end of a query. — Bloomberg
Reddit Inc is testing a new AI-powered chatbot as the social media company looks for ways to increase user interactions and keep people on its site.
The chatbot, called Reddit Answers, will help users find information, make recommendations and surface discussions from across the platform’s forums.
Reddit has been investing heavily in its search capabilities lately as it seeks to compete with traditional search engines and artificial intelligence companies that summarise information from across the web. The company in the past has struggled to help users find information on its site, which features more than one billion posts scattered across nearly 100,000 discussion forums.
"It’s clear searching stuff on Reddit is a major way people use the Internet,” said Serkan Piantino, Reddit’s vice president of product. "It’s my job and our job to make sure if you want to search on Reddit in any format, that we’re the best at doing that.”
Historically, third-party search engines have played a major role in helping users find information on Reddit. It’s common for people to search for Reddit posts via Google by adding the word Reddit to the end of a query. This year in the US, the word Reddit was the sixth-most searched word on Google, the company previously said.
Lately, however, some search engines and AI companies have simply been summarising Reddit’s content without sending users back to the site. In response, Reddit began blocking some search engines, including Microsoft Corp’s Bing and AI startup Perplexity, from accessing its forums without first signing commercial agreements.
Reddit has agreements with Alphabet Inc’s Google and OpenAI that allow summaries of Reddit posts to appear in Google searches and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. By signing such deals, the company can dictate the length of the summary that shows up in a search result, and whether a licensee has to display Reddit branding in AI-generated results. So far, Reddit has signed licensing agreements worth US$203mil (RM899.19mil) in total over the next two to three years.
Chatbots have become a popular feature within social networking products as a way to keep users from leaving to rival services every time they have a question. Meta Platforms Inc., which built its Meta AI chatbot into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says its chatbot has 600 million monthly users. Elon Musk’s X also offers a chatbot called Grok to paying users. Snapchat also has an AI chatbot.
Reddit Answers is rolling out to a limited number of users in the US starting Monday, with plans to expand to additional languages and locations. Answers will first be available on the web and iOS. The chatbot is powered by AI models from Reddit, OpenAI and Google, the company said. – Bloomberg
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