Alphabet expands and improves the functionality of the Google AI chatbot Bard. Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley details the new features.
video transcript
Rachel Akufo: Now, Alphabet is rolling out a new update to its AI system, Bard. The tech company is expected to expand the bot’s capabilities, languages and availability in several new countries.
Let’s talk to Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley and let him figure it all out. Hi Dan.
Dan Howley: That is correct. I’m talking about bard. This is Google’s AI chatbot, not to be confused with the search engine experiments Google is conducting, namely search generation experiences. It has generative AI built in. But it’s not Bard.
So here we are talking about individual apps. And the app itself is currently available in parts of Europe and Brazil. Available in 40 languages. And there are new features added. Among them is the ability to upload images to Bard. It also prompts you to give a response that relates to the image itself. This is what allows so-called multimodal responses, such as getting an image or getting a textual response.
And that’s how this kind of chatbot is really going to move forward. Alternatively, companies are trying to push these chatbots forward. We also saw further movement in the AI space. Elon Musk apparently started his own company out of a whim trying to make sense of the universe, but I’m not quite sure what that means. But he intends to keep a Twitter space for it. Let’s see.
And earlier this week, Bill Gates published an op-ed on AI and the fears that come with this kind of technology, and how to mitigate those fears. There is still a lot going on in this AI space. We had a lot of talks and discussions earlier this year. It lasted until the last few months. It still continues to a large extent. And this is not only Google really trying to fight back against OpenAI, but also against OpenAI backers Microsoft and his Bing chatbot in-house, saying, “Hey, we too. We have the ability to do this.”
They want to regain their position as the top AI field in Silicon Valley. And this is part of that effort.
Rachel Akufo: And, realistically, do you think they’re doing a good job of bridging that gap? Or is it too early to tell while we’re still waiting? New generative AI products and improvements seem to be rolling out daily.
Dan Howley: yes. I think it’s still early. It’s a secondary app. When it comes to searching, I think most people still use Google. And these chatbots are used for various purposes. But you can imagine most people use these to ask search-related questions. So when Google eventually rolls out search engine generated experiences using chatbots and their generation technology, I think we’ll start to see some real momentum for Google in that space.
For now this is a secondary app. It has absolutely nothing to do with the main search engine. Microsoft, on the other hand, has built it straight into its search engine. I think for Google to do that, they need to be able to incorporate it into the actual main Google search. There are many things they have to do to get there. Most important of all is the accuracy of the response. People turn to Google search to find the most important things, whether it’s about their finances or their health. Therefore, there can be no hallucinations associated with this kind of AI.
The other question is, I think this comes down to Google’s basic business, will they ever be able to show display ads at the top like they do now? . Its search-generated experience does not display ads at the top. And it could hurt Google’s bottom line. And that’s an issue they’ll have to work with, or at least probably need to figure out where to show ads alongside that to make sure they move forward.
So we still have to wait until all of them are probably cleared up. before actually seeing Google start to regain its momentum. But that’s the consumer side of the story. On the backend, this is basically the company that helped create the Transformers technology, which is the T for ChatGPT.
So they still know what they’re doing better than most people probably think.
Rachel Akufo: Well, we’re certainly going to track all of that. Thanks for the update. Our very own Dan Howley.
