AI has quickly embedded itself into the daily lives and work of people from around the globe. The live-streaming industry is no different; vedal987 on Twitch has built up an audience from their streams as Neurosama, an AI streamer who can interact with chat, react to pictures, and more. Twitch even has an AI tag on the platform, making it easier than ever to find streams hosted by artificial intelligence. So what are the future implications of AI in streaming? How AI can impact Twitch streamers in regards to audience reach? Will dedicated AI streamers take over the industry?
Fully AI streamers are at the extreme end of the scale. Many live-streamers benefit from utilising Artificial Intelligence in subtler ways to enhance their broadcasts without entirely surrendering the humanity of their channel. The AI industry has already entered the live-streaming sphere in multiple areas, and as the technology advances and improves, it will likely become an integral part of the live-streaming experience.
Neurosama responds to Twitch chat messages
AI Chatbots
Currently, live-streamers from around the world are making AI work to their benefit. Most regular Twitch viewers will be familiar with Nightbot or other similar chatbots. These bots have existed for years and allow streamers to automate many parts of their chat, including custom commands that viewers can interact with. The natural next step for many streamers was to update this bot to an AI.
Thousands of streamers on Twitch are already experimenting with various AI chatbots. These AI chatbots are highly customisable, helping streamers to integrate them seamlessly into their brand and content. With unique adjustable personalities, exclusive chat commands to interact with the Artificial Intelligence, and more, these bots are revolutionising the interactivity of the average Twitch streamer’s chat whilst still being able to maintain consistency with their brand and style.
Stream Chat A.I., ChatGPT Twitch Chatbot, and AITwitch are some of the leading chatbots integrating AI. Although these chatbots are still in their early days, it may become possible for streamers to offload some chat questions to a custom AI modelled after the streamer. Want to ask xQc a question without having it lost in the wave of chat messages? Ask his Artificial Intelligence chatbot modelled after himself the same question, receiving a direct and interactive answer.
Another key area where AI Twitch chatbots could assist streamers of all sizes is chat moderation. From smaller streamers who do the moderation all by themselves to the world’s biggest creators, moderating your live-stream chatroom can be an arduous task.
As AI-based chatbots evolve and develop their neural networks, streamers could teach an Artificial Intelligence chatbot the intricacies of their chat rules, allowing the chatbot to fully moderate the chat at a rate much faster than any human.
This would unlikely fully replace human chat moderators immediately, but rather allow them to focus on moderating the AI chatbot rather than trying to keep up with sometimes hundreds of messages a minute. Some of the most popular Twitch streamers have used the excuse that their chat is too large to moderate every message, but utilising AI may be the key to ensuring that your chat remains in line with your own rules and does not breach the platform’s terms of service.
AI Highlight Reels
Every live-streamer worth their salt knows that to build a significant audience it is best to diversify your content across various social media platforms. Many of the most-watched Twitch streamers of 2023 got their start on TikTok, YouTube, or another social media platform, and dedicated content creators who started on Twitch can benefit from these platforms too.
Read also: How to get more Twitch and YouTube followers in 2024
Scouring your live-streaming VODs for the funniest moments to upload to other social media platforms can be a chore for budding streamers, but it is proven to increase your following. Sifting through hours of live-stream footage to find the perfect 30-second TikTok or YouTube Short clip can be incredibly time-consuming: a task that AI can perform for you now.
Various AI highlight tools and collators exist for streamers to easily find, edit, and upload the best content from their hours of broadcasting. AI algorithms will search all live-stream VODs for the best content and help streamers edit them into short-form content for other platforms. Some of these highlight tools include: Framedrop, Eklipse, and Sizzle.gg.
With platform diversification being such an important step for any growing streamer, AI is making it easier than ever to manage accounts across multiple social media platforms.
Closed Captions
Closed Captions extensions and options have existed on Twitch for a handful of years now. However, AI has rejuvenated the technology with unprecedented accuracy and brand-new potential for the system.
Adding closed captions to your stream can be beneficial for many reasons, especially when these are optional captions able to be turned on and off as a viewer wishes, limiting the risk of some viewers not enjoying them. From viewers who simply can’t turn on the audio at the moment to viewers with disabilities, which make it hard to listen to a streamer, these captions open streamers up to a brand new audience that can better connect and interact with their content.
Although closed captions are enough of a benefit on their own, Artificial Intelligence opens exciting new opportunities to interact with and improve these captions.
Future utilisation of AI in the live-streaming industry
Real-time live-stream translations
The key opportunity of highly accurate closed caption services is that AI would be able to translate captions into whatever language a viewer would wish for. Combining this fact with constantly improving AI voices, streamers could essentially host multi-streams for all languages from around the globe.
YouTubers like MrBeast understand the power of reaching a global audience in their native language, which is why he launched a dubbing services company earlier this year. MrBeast has experience translating and dubbing his most popular videos into 10+ languages, allowing him to interact with and expose himself to a much larger audience than just English-speaking fans.
MrBeast’s Spanish-dubbed channel, featuring 25M Subscribers and over 112M Views on his Squid Game video
The next step of MrBeast’s approach to global content is to bring this dubbing phenomenon into real-time live-streaming, allowing streamers to interact with any fan in any language. Although English is often considered the main language of Twitch, English-language broadcasts accounted for less than 50% of the platform's viewership in 2022. According to our preliminary 2023 end-of-year statistics for Twitch, English-language broadcasts will account for even less viewership this year compared to 2022.
With huge communities of Spanish-speaking, German-speaking, and Korean-speaking audiences generating significant watch time on the platform, the first streamers to tap into all available audiences will benefit from exposure to a larger total audience than any other streamer.
Anonymity through voice-masking and deep fake technology
Many streamers on Twitch struggle with the fact that they are broadcasting to thousands and thousands of people who watch their every move. After gaining popularity in Japan in recent years, VTubing has permeated streaming culture globally, with streamers using VTuber avatars instead of webcam video.
Streamers have cited reasons such as wanting to avoid being on camera all day, feeling freer without worrying about their image, and more, as to how removing the webcam from their broadcast has benefited their streaming experience. With deep fake technology becoming more efficient, we may soon see a wave of deep fake streamers who still want to add some personality to their broadcasts without sacrificing their anonymity.
To take it a step further, streamers may begin to use real-time voice-altering AI software, allowing them to sound like other streamers, a celebrity, or someone brand new. This technology is still in its very early stages, but in the future streamers may value their privacy enough to mask their identity fully. With the rise of fully-fledged AI streamers taking Twitch by storm, the line between AI and streamers may blur even further.
AI-boosted algorithmic content suggestions
Most social media platforms use algorithms to provide users with suggested content. Facebook was one of the first social media platforms to introduce AI streamer tools to improve user experience, and TikTok is renowned for having perfected its algorithm. Even as far back as 2014, Facebook was conducting studies to attempt to create algorithms which evoked certain emotions from its users.
Live-streaming sites such as Twitch and YouTube already feature AI-fueled algorithmic suggestions, however, these currently utilise superficial live-stream information as a dataset for suggestions. Broadcast titles, streaming categories, tags, and engagement rates of broadcasts are some of the factors Twitch uses to automatically suggest users with new content and improve their experience.
However, with the vast strides AI has made in its speech-to-text capabilities, a new opportunity has presented itself for live-streaming platforms to suggest content based on overlap in the audio content of broadcasts. Rather than simply suggesting Counter-Strike content to users who watch Counter-Strike gameplay, live-streaming platforms could identify exactly what each streamer is discussing and generate keywords of each broadcast.
An updated AI algorithm could in the future recommend users live streaming channels which discuss rock music, even if rock music is not mentioned in the standard live-stream description. This updated algorithm would benefit smaller streamers, allowing them to be suggested to a perfectly fitting audience. AI does not only present streamers with opportunities to improve their content but allows the platform itself to refine its overall user experience and suggest heavily personalised content.
This would be a win-win scenario for both streamers and the platform itself. Streamers would be enabled to discover a more personal and niche audience on the platform, while the platform itself would increase its watch time and develop a more heavily invested viewer base.
Humans want human connections. AI is not near the point of replacing human entertainers in live-streaming, but the technology can be utilised to improve the live-streaming experience for both the streamer and audiences. As AI continues to evolve and improve itself, it will only deepen its foothold in industries around the world, and it’s here to stay. The quickest streamers to adapt and integrate AI into their live-streaming career will be those who benefit the most from it.
