After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product features for the year ahead, and — spoiler alert — most of them are powered by AI.
“I think the IPO was an important milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Baht told TechCrunch.
Reddit’s product roadmap includes faster loading times, more tools for moderators and developers, and an AI-powered language translation feature to bring Reddit to a more global audience.
According to Reddit’s IPO filing, in December 2023, 50% of Reddit’s daily active unique users were from non-U.S. countries.
The company will build on those updates with other new tools, like an LLM that’s trained on moderators’ past decisions and actions.
The company has rebranded to “Limitless,” and is now offering an AI-powered meeting suite and a hardware pendant that can record your conversations.
Company co-founder Dan Siroker first posted the idea of a conversation-recording pendant last October and started accepting orders at $59.
Siroker posted the final design this week, along with the news of the company’s pivot.
It’s a web app, Mac app, Windows app, and a wearable.
We plan to reimplement many of our user’s favorite Rewind features directly into Limitless,” Siroker said.
On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free.
But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect.
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required.
YouTube announced on Tuesday that it’s launching new Shopping features that allow creators to curate shoppable collections, better plan their shoppable videos, quickly monetize older videos and more.
The launch of the new features come as TikTok Shop is seeking to take on YouTube Shopping and other competitors in the space.
TikTok is reportedly aiming to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year.
YouTube is launching “Shopping Collections” to allow creators to curate products from their favorite brands for users to browse through.
By allowing users to connect their Fourthwall shop, YouTube is making it easier for users to create and manage their content directly in YouTube Studio.
Smart ring manufacturer Oura is introducing a new section in its app called Oura Labs to test out new features and get user feedback.
Oura said that Symptom Radar will monitor biometric signals such as body temperature range, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.
“Oura Labs is our approach to recreate internal engagement for new features with users in a structured and formal way.
Users will get to see a lot of early-stage ideas in Oura Labs,” Patel said.
Users can provide direct feedback about these experimental features along with general feedback for the product through Oura Labs.
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
The addition of music videos is included among these new features in the U.S.Spotify recently announced its plans to support music videos, saying in March it would test the option in beta in 11 select markets — which, at the time, didn’t include the U.S.
With the UMG deal, U.S. users will also have the option of watching music videos instead of just streaming audio.
To watch videos, Spotify users can access a new “Switch to Video” option from the app’s Now Playing Screen.
For instance, UMG artists will be able to share teasers of upcoming songs and users will be able to pre-save music before a new release.
By partnering with Spotify, UMG still has a way to promote its music to fans, even if its artists lose the ability to market themselves on TikTok.
Google announced today that it will soon roll out on-device AI-powered features such as recording summaries and smart replies on the Pixel 8.
These features will be based on Gemini Nano, a small-sized model Google released last year, primed to run on devices.
The company announced these features last October during the Pixel 8 launch.
In January, Google introduced “Circle to Search” for select Pixel and Samsung Devices.
The company announced this week that more Pixel and Sasmung phones along with select tablets will get Circle to Search feature.
Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned.
“It takes a lot less to run it than we had imagined,” Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, adding that it’s just himself and Krieger running Artifact right now.
Artifact made a splash at launch, not only because it was the first major effort at a new social app from Instagram’s co-founders, but also because of its clever use of AI.
pic.twitter.com/5PaMavJbNS — @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io (@samhenrigold) March 16, 2024Following Artifact’s announcement of its impending closure, interest in using AI to summarize the news has heated up.
Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered “pinch to summarize” feature ahead of its $50 million fundraise.
Some of these features sound and work like rival browser Arc’s recent releases.
But SigmaOS claims that its feature returns better-quality results, which is a hard metric to quantify.
Going all out on AILast year, SigmaOS released some AI-powered features such as a contextual assistant called Airis, which can answer your questions about a web page or the broader web.
Now, the company is looking to monetize its AI features.
It said that all users would get access to AI-powered features but for $20 per month users would get better rate limits for AI features.
