Discord to roll out AI-powered chatbot, messaging features

Chat app Discord said on Thursday it will introduce new artificial intelligence features that can summarize long conversations or add decorations to a user's avatar, the latest move among tech companies to build generative AI tools.

Generative AI, which has captured the attention of the tech industry, is a technology that can generate images, text or video in response to a prompt.

Startups like OpenAI and tech giants like Microsoft and Google have introduced or announced AI chatbots that can synthesize web information to answer complex searches or even write original novels. 

"We're seeing one of the most exciting moments in technology emerging," Jason Citron, chief executive of San Francisco-based Discord, said during a press briefing.

Discord, which lets groups of users chat by text, video and voice, said it will revamp a bot called Clyde, who will now be powered by OpenAI technology. Discord users can invoke the AI-powered Clyde to answer trivia questions, help schedule meetings or recommend playlists, the company said.

Another AI feature will let users "remix" their friends' avatars using generative image models. For instance, the feature could place a crown on a person's head in their profile image to celebrate their birthday.

If users have been away from Discord and missed a stream of messages, an AI tool will be able to summarize the conversation and allow users to quickly jump back to parts of the message thread to catch up on the discussion. The tool will begin to roll out next week in a limited number of Discord groups, the company said.

Discord said it will also experiment with OpenAI technology to improve an existing content moderation tool that helps automatically block harmful or unwanted messages from a Discord chat. The revamped tool can flag messages to moderators and also understand the context of the conversation, the company said.