Reddit is rolling out a test of an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that can provide answers from Reddit conversations and posts.
Reddit Answers will respond to users' questions with summaries of conversations from across the social media platform, and provide links to relevant communities and posts, the company said. The chatbot can also make recommendations and suggest follow-up questions.
With the AI chatbot, Reddit users can skip using Google (GOOGL-0.03%) search or OpenAI's ChatGPT to find information and discussions on Reddit. The social media platform already has agreements with both companies for summaries of Reddit posts to come up in Google searches and ChatGPT responses.
"It's clear searching stuff on Reddit is a major way people use the internet," Serkan Piantino, Reddit's vice president of product, told Bloomberg. "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."
In October, OpenAI launched ChatGPT search to challenge Google's search dominance. The feature provides links to relevant web sources in responses, "which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for," OpenAI said. With web search on ChatGPT, users can ask questions "in a more natural, conversation way."
The Reddit Answers chatbot is being powered by AI models from Reddit, OpenAI, and Google, the company told Bloomberg.
Piantino told CNBC that Reddit has been testing the chatbot for six months, and that users can ask about any topic except those considered not safe for work, or NSFW.
A limited number of users in the U.S. will have access to Reddit Answers starting Monday. The feature currently supports English, but the company plans to expand to more languages and locations in the future.