Google has unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) and software at its annual Google I/O event to “accelerate its growth and bridge the innovation gap”.
It includes a much-improved version of Google “Bard”, a large language model (LLM), and a generative AI developer interface. The LLM is so versatile that Google announced over 25 products and features that are powered by PaLM 2 at Google I/O. In the past, Google typically held onto its AI models until the company was sure they were fully ready to be released to the public.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Bard a “souped-up Civic” compared to other AI models in an interview. Some updates geared towards improving user experience include a new Bard dark theme and a new export feature allowing for chat export into Gmail and Docs.
Google Lens is also coming to Bard, allowing users to upload photos to Bard and ask for prompts regarding the photo. In order to keep up with Bing Chat, it had been rumored that Google was working on integrating AI features into its own search engine. At Google I/O, Google unveiled Search with generative AI through a new Search Generative Experience (SGE).
The new Search will have AI-powered snapshots which provide users with concise, informative, and conversational answers to any search query. It has been reported that Google rushed to develop its AI search engine after Samsung considered ditching it for Bing. Google has been a leader in developing advanced AI and machine learning models for many years. Even Google’s direct answer to those services, Google Bard, has been underwhelming and fallen short of expectations. With the new AI and software unveiled at Google I/O, Google hopes to accelerate its growth and bridge the innovation gap.
- Here are the highlights from the conference:
Google debuted its latest language model, Pathways Language Model 2 or PaLM 2, which now fully-powers Bard, Google’s AI chatbot rival to Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot. - Bard can now not only write code, but also explain specific functions and answer questions about how to fix or improve code – and the resulting code snippets can be sent to Google’s Colab or Replit for easy collaboration. If it pulls code from another source, it will also now cite that source.
- Bard will become “more visual” in the next few weeks, both in responses and prompts.
- This means Bard search results will start returning images for relevant queries, and also that people will be able to prompt bard “with images” using Google Lens integration.
- Google will also be collaborating with third-parties to add features to Bard, such as text-prompted image generation thanks to integration with Adobe Firefly (opens in new tab).
- The company is calling these “tools” and showed a graphic with several companies’ logos including Kayak, OpenTable, Tripadvisor, Spotify, and Walmart.
- Finally, Google has dropped the waitlist and Bard is now available in 180 countries and has added support for prompts in Japanese and Korean.
- Google also demonstrated its new AI-powered toolset for Google Workspace (Google’s suite of productivity apps, which includes Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet), which it’s now calling “Duet AI for Google Workspace” (the toolset, not Workspace).
- It’s called “Duet AI” because Google imagines that you’ll be collaborating with AI, like you collaborate with coworkers and other humans in Workspace apps right now.
- The upcoming tools will let users do things like generate summaries from notes, create images from text prompts within Google Slides, create templates from text prompts in Google Sheets, and create custom backgrounds in Google Meet.
- Google also demonstrated a future ‘Sidekick’ panel that will be able to read your content and “engage” with you using contextual prompts.