rewrite this title Reddit expands its AI-powered search to five new languages | TechCrunch

Reddit announced Thursday that it is expanding its AI-powered search experience to five new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. With this expansion, the feature is now available in countries like Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Italy.

Users who have set one of these languages as their default, instead of English, can now chat with the AI in question-and-answer format. Reddit uses a Google AI model to power the feature.

Reddit first debuted AI-powered search last year and has been working to expand it in different ways. The feature is part of Reddit Answers, which lives alongside the platform’s traditional search.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in August that Reddit search has more than 70 million weekly users, while Reddit Answers is used by more than 6 million people. He also discussed plans to unify the search experience during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Q&A-style search and chat interfaces have been gaining popularity since ChatGPT integrated web search. Incumbent search engines like Google and Brave have introduced similar features to improve user engagement and retention. Newer startups like Perplexity have also gained steam with chat-based search interfaces.