As AI race heats up, Google unveils ‘magic wand’ for drafting documents

PALO ALTO, Calif.: Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., unveiled a flurry of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for email, collaboration and cloud software on Tuesday, just days before rivals are expected to make similar announcements at Microsoft Corp. aimed at

Alphabet, in a replay of the tech giants’ duel chatbot launch last month, showed how the popular Google Docs software, which lets users draft marketing blogs, training plans, or other text and modify the tone at their discretion Promoted “Magic Wand”. Officials from the company gave a demonstration to reporters.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will show off competing word processors at Thursday’s event, hinting at how it’s “reinventing productivity with AI.”

Alphabet’s AI will also be able to summarize Gmail message threads, create slide presentations, personalize customer interactions and take meeting notes. This is part of an upgrade to Google Workspace, a product suite with billions of users across free and paid accounts.

The advance reflects how ChatGPT has spurred a race in Silicon Valley to imbue products with so-called generative AI, which learns how to recreate content from historical data, much like the chatbot sensation. doing.

Microsoft, Alphabet, and peers have invested billions of dollars in building and deploying technology that will win business by making writing and creative tasks faster for office workers, greatly reducing the cost of these efforts. expected to surpass

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a press briefing:

Similar to the phased release of Microsoft’s chatbot program, Alphabet is giving authorized test users access to new Workspace features on a rolling basis throughout the year before a broader release.

Kurian declined to say how much the Workspace upgrade would cost businesses and consumers.

AI generated corgi

Google also unveils a range of generative AI tools for cloud computing customers, including a preview of access to PaLM, one of the most powerful “large-scale language models” to create human-like text Did.

Google says customers can fine-tune AI models with their own data, while keeping the information and profits their own.

In another enterprise software example, Google showed how a fictional furniture business built a better customer service chatbot that could generate text as well as images. For example, here’s what a corgi dog looks like in a mid-20th century modern chair.

A promotional video showed that the chatbot could integrate with payment systems, allowing shoppers to purchase chairs.

According to the video, Google hopes its AI will “transform” the work of marketers, lawyers, scientists and educators.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has announced a partnership with renowned AI research lab Midjourney to partner with Google to provide cloud infrastructure, including its own “TPU” chips.

So far, Microsoft’s generative AI deployment has surpassed that of Alphabet, which is wary of social harm and damage to its reputation as a trusted source of information.

Such software remains prone to inaccurate responses known as “hallucinations”.

A factual error made by Alphabet’s chatbot Bard in last month’s demo contributed to a $100 billion drop in market value, while Microsoft said the Bing search chatbot was not professing love or threatening test users. I did my own due diligence when I did.

Kurian said Google continues to be “deeply committed to responsible AI,” giving customers control and reviewing how to properly use their products. Microsoft has also added safeguards to its search software.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin, Palo Alto, CA; Editing by Jamie Freed)