Google is planning a major overhaul of its Google Assistant digital assistant, with the goal of making it more natural and engaging to use. The overhaul will involve the integration of generative AI from the Google Bard chatbot.
Generative AI is already being used in some Google products, such as Google Translate and Google Docs. However, the integration of generative AI into Google Assistant will represent a major step forward. It will allow Google Assistant to engage in more natural conversations, provide more detailed and nuanced responses, and perform tasks more intelligently.
Google Bard is an AI chatbot that is powered by the LaMDA large language model. It is a chatbot that Google launched in early 2023 to let users collaborate with generative AI. Users can ask Bard questions, get tips, explanations, summaries, and generate various forms of content, such as poems, stories, jokes, or code.
Bard can access the internet to leverage Google Search for its responses, and it also has a “Google it” button that allows users to fact-check and find out what sources have been used. Bard is seen as a rival to ChatGPT, which was launched last year by OpenAI.
Google has warned that Bard has “limitations” and could share misinformation, biases, or stereotypes, as it learns from a wide range of information that reflects real-world data. Even so, by folding it into the voice-activated Google Assistant will make Bard more readily available to users for every day tasks, as well as in smart home setups.
Bringing Bard Chatbot Capabilities to Google Assistant
For example, Google Assistant will be able to better understand the context of a conversation. If you ask Google Assistant to “book a flight to New York,” it will be able to understand that you are referring to a specific city in the United States, rather than a general term for a large urban area. This will allow Google Assistant to provide more relevant and accurate information.
Google Assistant will also be able to generate more creative and engaging responses. For example, if you ask Google Assistant to “tell me a joke,” it will be able to generate a more original and humorous joke than it could before. This will make Google Assistant more fun to use and will help to keep users engaged.
Google is shaking up its Assistant team and cutting some jobs in the process. An email obtained by Axios shows the company trimming down the number of roles for its voice assistant, but didn’t say how many people are losing their positions. Axios reports that the layoffs affect “dozens” of workers. This will allow the company to put more emphasis on generative AI.
It is unclear if the job cuts are part of Google’s wider layoffs this year, which saw 11,000+ workers lose their jobs. The overhaul of Google Assistant is still in the early stages, but it has the potential to make a significant impact on the way people interact with the digital assistant. If successful, the overhaul could make Google Assistant more useful, more engaging, and more popular than ever before.
Last Updated on November 8, 2024 12:13 pm CET