Google on Thursday announced a major rebrand of Bard, its artificial intelligence chatbot and assistant, such as a fresh new app and membership selections. Bard, a main competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is now referred to as Gemini, the similar identify as the suite of AI types that power the chatbot.
Google also announced new ways for customers to obtain the AI device: As of Thursday, Android people can download a new devoted Android application for Gemini, and Iphone people can use Gemini inside the Google application on iOS.
Google’s rebrand and app offerings underline the firm’s dedication to pursuing — and investing intensely in — AI assistants or brokers, a expression generally employed to explain equipment ranging from chatbots to coding assistants and other efficiency tools.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the firm’s motivation to AI all through the company’s Jan. 30 earnings phone. Pichai claimed he at some point wants to offer you an AI agent that can complete additional and extra responsibilities on a user’s behalf, like in Google Search, whilst he claimed there is “a whole lot of execution in advance.” Also, main executives at tech giants from Microsoft to Amazon underlined their motivation to constructing AI agents as efficiency tools.
Google’s Gemini changes are a initial step to “building a true AI assistant,” Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google and common supervisor for Google Assistant and Bard, advised reporters on a simply call Wednesday.
Google on Thursday also announced a new AI subscription selection, for electricity buyers who want entry to Gemini Extremely 1., Google’s most highly effective AI design. Entry expenditures $19.99 for every month by way of Google 1, the firm’s paid out storage giving. For current Google A person subscribers, that rate contains the storage designs they could now be spending for. There’s also a two-thirty day period free trial accessible.
Thursday’s rollouts are available to end users in more than 150 nations and territories, but they’re limited to the English language for now. Google options to extend language offerings to incorporate Japanese and Korean shortly, as properly as other languages.
The Bard rebrand also affects Duet AI, Google’s former name for the “packaged AI brokers” in Google Workspace and Google Cloud, which are built to improve productiveness and finish simple duties for customer corporations such as Wayfair, GE, Spotify and Pfizer. The equipment will now be known as Gemini for Workspace and Gemini for Google Cloud.
Google A single subscribers who shell out for the AI subscription will also have obtain to Gemini’s assistant capabilities in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Fulfill, executives explained to reporters Wednesday. Google hopes to include extra context into Gemini from users’ written content in Gmail, Docs and Drive. For case in point, if you were being responding to a very long electronic mail thread, advised responses would at some point get in context from each earlier messages in the thread and most likely appropriate data files in Google Travel.
As for the reason for the broad identify adjust? Google’s Hsiao advised reporters Wednesday that it is about assisting end users recognize that they are interacting instantly with the AI models that underpin the chatbot.
“Bard [was] the way to chat to our reducing-edge designs, and Gemini is our reducing-edge styles,” Hsiao explained.
Ultimately, AI agents could perhaps schedule a group hangout by scanning everyone’s calendar to make sure there are no conflicts, guide journey and routines, get provides for cherished types or execute a unique job function this kind of as outbound sales. At the moment, nevertheless, the instruments, which includes Gemini, are largely restricted to responsibilities this sort of as summarizing, producing to-do lists or aiding to create code.
“We will once more use generative AI there, significantly with our most superior products and Bard,” Pichai claimed on the Jan. 30 earnings contact, speaking about Google Assistant and Research. That “enables us to act additional like an agent above time, if I ended up to consider about the long term and it’s possible go outside of solutions and abide by-as a result of for buyers even a lot more.”
