Google is into its journey as an AI-first company, and this year has announced new products, platforms, and generative AI advancements that share a single goal: to make AI even more helpful for everyone - people, businesses, and communities.
A wave of announcements came through during the Google I/O conference keynote. Highlights include:
• The introduction of new ways to collaborate with its Bard service and bring it to more people, including New Zealanders.
• The company announced PaLM 2, a next-generation language model with improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. It’s smaller, faster, and more efficient, making it easier to deploy across a wide range of tasks. Med-PaLM 2, trained by health research teams with medical knowledge, can answer questions and summarise insights from various dense medical texts.
• With generative AI technology, Google can unlock entirely new types of questions for their Search to answer and transform the way information is organised. The company is starting with an experiment in Search Labs called SGE (Search Generative Experience), available on Chrome desktop and the Google App (Android and iOS) in the U.S. (English-only at launch), incorporating feedback and continuing to improve the experience over time.
• Generative AI gets to work with Canva adding new generative AI features to deliver a seamless content creation experience to Google Cloud/Workspace users. Several new capabilities were announced, including Duet AI - an AI-powered collaborator for users and developers. Duet AI for Cloud serves as an expert pair programmer and assists with contextual code completion and more. Duet AI for Workspace enables collaboration with AI including help writing features in Gmail on mobile, generating images from text in Google Slides and quickly turning ideas into action with helpful tables in Sheets.
• An update on the Android ecosystem was shown alongside new AI-powered features that make your phone uniquely yours.
• New features and updates to improve online safety were also previewed, including access to trustworthy information and content, implementing new protections that safeguard information and introducing tools that give you more control over your data.
