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Google headquarters in Mountain View, California
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IMAGO/Offenberg / IMAGO/Christian Offenberg
Google is under pressure.
The Internet giant has long been developing software based on artificial intelligence that can talk to people.
For years, however, the company hesitated to publish it.
At the end of last year, the developer company OpenAI, supported by Google's competitor Microsoft, launched its ChatGPT software.
In a matter of seconds, the software formulates texts that could also have been written by a human being.
This caused a stir internationally.
At Google, this apparently led to a change of heart in its own application.
With a comprehensive initiative, artificial intelligence is now to be presented to a broad public.
This was announced by CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog entry.
The initiative consists of three parts: a chatbot called Bard, new AI functions in Google search, and the provision of programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used to develop AI applications.
The AI-controlled language model Lamda (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) from Google will play a central role in this.
The group management had celebrated Lamba 2021 as a "breakthrough in conversation technology".
After that, the model disappeared from public view, but briefly returned there once in 2022.
An engineer was put on leave after describing the AI as a sentient being.
Bard relies on a variant of Lamda and is described by Google as an “experimental AI service for conversations”.
Bard will be open to "trusted testers" immediately before opening to the public in the coming weeks.
With the name of the service (German: "Barde"), Google alludes to the poet William Shakespeare.
England's national poet is often referred to as the 'Bard of Avon'.
Insights into new features in Google Search
Google also wants to offer a glimpse into several AI-powered features in Google Search.
This is intended to summarize findings for questions to which there is no single correct answer.
You will soon see functions in the search "that convert complex information and different points of view into easily digestible formats".
In spring 2018, the group demonstrated a program that called restaurants to make a reservation - and was not recognized as a computer.
Criticism was immediately raised that such technology could be misused.
Google has had its voice software used internally by employees for the past few years, but shied away from a broad market launch due to the risks.
hba/dpa