Discort announces new AI features to help chat users recap

The Reuters chat app Discord announced 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 announced AI chatbots that can synthesize web information to answer complex searches or even write original novels.

Jason Citron, chief executive of San Francisco-based Discord, said during a press conference that we are seeing one of the most exciting moments in technology emerging.

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

Another AI feature will allow users to remix their friends' avatars using generative image models. The feature could place a crown on a person's head in their profile picture 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 be rolling out next week in a limited number of Discord groups, the company said.

Discord will experiment with OpenAI technology to improve its existing content moderation tool that automatically blocks unwanted messages from a Discord chat. The tool can flag messages to moderators and also understand the context of the conversation, the company said.