We still can’t ask Google something like this: “Ok Google, send my boss an email of the agreement that I reached with the client with whom I just closed a deal by mail.” And something like that was what many expected Google to announce today at its Google I/O developer conference.
Board, the assistant with which Google wants to compete with ChatGPT, can already be used in 180 countries (Spain is not included in the list), and has launched the second version of PaLM. The language on which Bard is based.
But this is far from being enough for Google to compete with ChatGPT, which today is the symbol of the power of artificial intelligence. Although this is a movie that has just started and it is difficult to know how the plot will unfold in the coming months.
That is why the most interesting thing that Google has offered today is an avalanche of AI integration announcements in its services: from Android 14 to its search engine. And it is not a little.
There is an underworld of developers and AI enthusiasts who daily announce all kinds of tools to integrate ChatGPT where Open AI, the company that develops it, cannot reach: from reading PDF files to analyze them to using it from WhatsApp. Most of these creations are only used by a small handful of enthusiasts.
But Google has a huge ecosystem of services that can integrate AI without all of that. A universe of applications that starts with the most used operating system in the world, Android 14 has been presented today, and a search engine that is much more used today than Microsoft’s Bing (which integrates a reduced version of ChatGPT).
In both services it has announced news based on artificial intelligence. Although the biggest innovations seem to be in the search engine, which will be based less on keywords and more on questions. Smart images will also be more present in searches.
What Google has shown about its search engine looks good and seems to be ahead of what Microsoft offers today with Bing with ChatGPT built in. But we will have to see it work in practice. In Spain it is not yet possible, since it is not among the countries from which you can request access to a trial version of the search engine.
In Android, access to artificial intelligence is still very timid. In Android 14 Google has only announced a technology that will help us write texts in the Messages application. Also a system that allows us to achieve an interface with uniform color palettes according to the images we want.
If there seems to be interesting improvements in Google Photos and Gmail. The popular photo storage service seems to be taking a leap forward with AI. Now it is possible to correct aspects of our photos with the power that Photoshop offers, but with much more ease. Although it will be necessary to verify its degree of effectiveness.
Gmail’s Help Me Write tool can also be very handy. Well, thanks to AI, it can generate drafts with emails that we can edit or leave as they have been generated. We can also ask Bard from Gmail to improve the text with a function called Increase. There are similar advances in Google Documents. AI also makes its appearance in Google Maps offering immersive 3D views to plan routes.
And what about Bard? Well, although Google has unified all its artificial intelligence divisions in Deepmind, the development of its main artificial intelligence is not advancing at the expected rate. PaLM language update is the key to compete with ChatGPT.
Although Google has begun to offer interesting things that ChatGPT lacks at the moment. Especially the use of images through the Lens function, the reverse search tool that several Google tools already use.
Google has also announced more visual results than Bard already gets. Incorporating images to the answers. Something that stands out: Google is going to incorporate Bard into the Adobe Firefly intelligent image generator, which we have had the opportunity to test and it is quite interesting.
In fact, Google is networking with companies like Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart Wolfram, and Khan Academy to improve Bard’s tools.
Finally, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on building artificial intelligence with ethical criteria. Here you can consult its decalogue. This is key considering the recent resignation of Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI at Google. He is now dedicated to warning of the risks of this technology.
