The top two search engine providers — Google and Microsoft — announced a series of new artificial intelligence innovations for their platforms.
Google announced Bard on Monday, followed by Microsoft’s launch of an all-new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA that is now open to trusted testers. The app draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
On Wednesday, Google unveiled new AI-powered features for its Search, Maps, and Lens apps.
"In the coming months, you’ll be able to use Lens to ‘search your screen’ on Android globally. With this technology, you can search what you see in photos or videos across websites and apps you know and love, like messaging and video apps — without having to leave the app or experience."
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Other updates will include Google Maps’ immersive view and Live View, along with new features for electric vehicle (EV) drivers and people who walk, bike, or ride public transit.
The immersive view will begin rolling out in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo, and in the coming months, the venue will launch in more cities like Amsterdam, Dublin, Florence, and Venice.
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Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AI upgrades to its Bing search engine and Edge web browser are designed to combine search, browsing, and chat to one unified experience users can invoke from anywhere on the web.
"There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered," Microsoft stated in the release. "That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short."
The company co-founded by Bill Gates said the unified experience will provide better search results, complete answers, and a new chat experience.
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Additionally, the Edge browser will have AI capabilities, a new look, and two new functionalities: Chat and Compose.
With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways — and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table.
You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format, and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.
The Google upgrades are coming in the face of Microsoft’s growing market share, powered by the new Bing search engine and by a more powerful version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Last month, Microsoft announced it would invest as much as $10 billion into the artificial intelligence research laboratory and ChatGPT-designer OpenAI.The
The joint announcement highlighted the third phase of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multi billion-dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs and ensure the technology’s benefits are shared around the world.
The deal will extend collaborations between the two companies from 2019 and 2020 to include AI supercomputing and research, while enabling both to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
ChatGPT is a chatbot built atop the parent company’s GPT-3 series of language models.
The conversational bot utilizes large databases and will respond to user questions and create other content on a wide array of subjects. Among many other forms, responses include answers, essays, legal briefs and computer code
