Research
WaLLM -- Understanding Use and Engagement with a General-Purpose LLM on WhatsApp
arXiv:2505.08894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) chatbots are increasingly reaching users through messaging platforms (e.g. WhatsApp). However, these systems remain
arXiv:2505.08894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) chatbots are increasingly reaching users through messaging platforms (e.g. WhatsApp). However, these systems remain largely proprietary and opaque, while academic research has focused on narrow, domain-specific assistants. This leaves open questions about how people use general-purpose LLMs and how such systems should be designed. To address this gap, we developed WaLLM, a general-purpose LLM chatbot, and deployed it on WhatsApp as a design probe to study open-ended AI use in the wild. Our findings show that health and well-being accounted for the largest proportion of queries, suggesting that users turned to WaLLM for advice and information. Engagement features varied in their adoption and associated patterns of use: proactive communication supported the service's visibility and correlated with higher user activity, while communal lists facilitated content discovery. We report how these features were adapted to WhatsApp's affordances and discuss implications for designing general-purpose LLM services over messaging platforms.
Related
- Uncertainty-Aware Trust Estimation for Multi-LLM Systems via Structured Expert Judgement
- Towards Safer Social Media Platforms: Scalable and Performant Few-Shot Harmful Content Moderation Using Large Language Models
- Towards Efficient Large Language Model Serving: A Survey on System-Aware KV Cache Optimization
Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-10-02