Alphabet, the owner of Google, has launched an artificial intelligence agent capable of answering real-time questions across audio, video and text. The move is part of several initiatives to demonstrate Alphabet’s AI prowess and dispel criticisms that it had fallen behind competitors.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Silicon Valley giant, demonstrated Project Astra, a new “multimodal” Assistant powered by an improved version of Gemini’s model, at an annual developer conference held on Tuesday.
Astra is part of a series of announcements that showcased a new AI vision for Google. This follows the product launches and upgraded AI model from Big Tech competitors including Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Google’s AI assistant prototype responded to voice commands in a video demonstration based on what it saw through the phone camera or smart glasses.
The camera recognized the King’s Cross area of London and the user was reminded where their glasses were.
Pichai stated that Google will begin adding Astra capabilities to the Gemini app this year and to all of its products. Pichai cautioned, however, that although the ultimate goal is to make Astra available across all of the company’s products, the software will be introduced cautiously.
“Getting response times down to something that is conversational, is a difficult challenge,” said Demis Hassabis. He’s the head of DeepMind’s AI research division. It is incredible to see how far AI technology has progressed, particularly when it comes spatial understanding, video-processing and memory.
Google announced major changes for its core search engine at the conference. All US users will now see a “AI Overview”, a short AI-generated summary of the query, at the top. This will be followed by clickable links and ads.
The company said the AI agent will be able answer complex questions using multi-step reasoning – meaning it can make multiple independent decisions to complete a particular task – and assist customers in creating search queries by voice or video.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, stated that the goal was to “remove a lot of the legwork from search”. She also said that AI overview will be extended to other users around the world in the second half of this year.
OpenAI, which is a threat to Google’s search engine business, has prompted the changes.
ChatGPT, the chatbot from a San Francisco start-up, provides complete and quick answers to many common questions. It threatens to make obsolete traditional search results which include a list of links along with advertising. OpenAI also has signed agreements with media organisations in order to provide up-to-date information and improve its responses.
OpenAI showed off a cheaper and faster version of ChatGPT’s model on Monday, in an apparent attempt to overshadow Google’s announcements. This model can interpret code, voice, and video in the same interface.
Google has also announced new AI products, including Veo which creates videos from text prompts, Imagen 3 that generates images, and Lyria a model of AI music creation. Subscribers of Gemini Advanced can create “Gems”, which are personalised chatbots that help with specific tasks.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, the company’s flagship model, has also been updated. The context window has been increased to 2mn tokens, which refers to the amount data it can use to generate a response.
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