There remains no doubt that Google is all in on AI, but the tech giant is making sure to move slowly and carefully as it hands over these intelligent tools to more users.
It is a good thing you play a game that included gulping down an alcoholic shot every time AI was murmured at Google I/O 2023 keynote. It might have all gone pear shaped, because the tech giant’s focus on AI is so exhaustive, it spans everything from the Bard chatbot, a new search tool to identify AI generated images, a coding bot for Android developers, an AI tool for app developers to help them build Play Store listings and Android’s generative AI dreams for text messages and wallpapers.
Google Bard Chatbot: Globally available, in limited languages
It is undeniable that Google has started the developer conference chapter for this summer, establishing a high bar for competitors like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and even Apple to try and meet in the following weeks. The biggest news is that anyone who wants to try it can use the Bard chatbot, albeit with a few limited languages. With Bard joining OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot, your life's troika of chatbots is now complete.
The chatbot misbehaving (misinformation, bias, etc.) when dealing with a user is obviously a risk Google is unwilling to take. Up until this point, only a very small number of people in the US and the UK had access to Bard. The waitlist was required for the remainder. This is the first significant global extension of the availability of Bard AI.
“As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us,” says Sissie Hsiao, Vice President and General Manager for Google Assistant and Bard. Bard is currently accessible in 180 nations and supports English, Korean, and Japanese.
Hsiao confirms they are in line to offer support for 40 more languages, in the following weeks. She continues, "As we continue to grow, we'll continue to uphold our high standards for quality and local subtleties while also ensuring we follow our AI Principles.
There are more planned additions to look out for besides languages. In the near future, Bard will be able to converse with you based on an image you may have submitted to the chat and will also produce search results with other images.
Google wants to integrate Bard into its own collection of applications, which already includes Docs, Drive, Gmail, and Maps. Additionally, there will be connectors with third parties, such as Adobe Firefly, to assist users in creating high-quality AI imagery.
Generative AI: The future of Android?
In a change from tradition, Android was not the main emphasis of Google's annual developer conference this year. However, there was discussion of Android on tablets, foldable devices, Android TV, and wearables. But we did see a preview of the AI infusion that Android 14 is supposed to provide, which is likely to launch later this summer.
Magic Compose will be added to the Android Messages app. By doing this, reply recommendations will be generated "based on the context of your messages" and will make an effort to sound natural in a text conversation. Sometime in the upcoming weeks, the beta version will be released.
"Make your communications less complicated, formal, or even Shakespearean! When Magic Compose launches this summer in beta, test it out for yourself, advises Dave Burke, Google's vice president of engineering.
Two visual features, dubbed Cinematic Wallpaper and Generative AI Wallpaper, will also be available. Your favourite gallery photographs from the former will gain a 3D dimension using on-device machine learning, and you can then set them as your phone's wallpaper. The latter will create an image using Google's text-to-image diffusion approach, which you can once more set as your phone's wallpaper.
Think of this as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion for a really specialised Android phone capability. If these photographs produced by either functionality can be shared with other people or devices is not yet known.
AI for Search: Distinguish between AI images and real photos
In the coming weeks, Google will add a new information layer in search results, which will provide users with more context about the image – when that image was first indexed on Google Search, similar images and their indexing timelines as well as the websites they have appeared on.
This comes at a time when AI generated images, which are looking increasingly real and accurate, have caught many off guard. Fake pictures have been making the rounds on social media in recent months, including one that appears to show the moment former US President Donald Trump being taken into custody. AI tools such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are becoming increasingly accurate with detailing, including body features and skin tones.
"With this background knowledge about an image, you may determine whether it is trustworthy or if you need to give it another look. For example, with About this image, you’d be able to see that news articles pointed out that this image representing a staged moon landing was AI-made,” says Cory Dunton, Product Manager for Search, referring to an AI generated image of a moon landing.
AI for developers: coding and listing help
A new AI bot that assists app developers with coding will be available. It will go by the name Studio Bot and is anticipated to assist developers in creating apps by generating code and correcting mistakes. The bot, according to Google, is based on Codey, a new foundational coding model that evolved from the PaLM 2 large language model (LLM). The Studio Bot supports Kotlin and Java programming languages.
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