Google fires back! Integrates more AI across it's product line.

Google makes AI the star at their I/O event

On Wednesday morning, Google kicked off their annual I/O event, and as was much anticipated, there were A LOT of announcements for AI. Here are a few of the more interesting:

• Help Me Write (HMW) - This chat based experience brings the power of Bard to Gmail and Docs, and enables users to overcome writers block, with the help of AI. Much like Microsoft’s announced Copilot, HMW adds text summary and text generation for a given prompt. Basically, yet another tool for students to abuse when writing their papers, or for busy office workers needing to save some time writing that follow-up email. 😀 

• Bard. 

  • The waitlist has been removed and is available for all to try out.

  • Bard has also been updated with enhanced programming capabilities for code generation, debugging, and code explanations.

  • Google Lens and Adobe firefly (image generation) has also been integrated.

  • Support for 3rd party integrations, similar to ChatGPT plugins.

  • Google workspaces received the expected across the board updates of integrating Bard into its apps.

• Search - Generative AI has been integrated into traditional search, offering a deeper, and more meaningful search experience.

• Vertex AI - an hosted AI platform for the enterprises. On the surface this doesn’t seem all that interesting and feels like what Azure and AWS are already doing, but there were some very interesting features which make it worth a look.

  • Enterprise search integration with your own data

  • Codey - support for training on your companies code bases

  • Train the models with your own industry data.

    The ability to use your own data is HUGE and will enable more useful features for businesses.

Ryan’s hot take: While Google made a ton of announcements and many of them are nicely integrated, from the AI perspective it feels more like table stakes and personally I had hoped to see something more innovative.

You can try out all of the new (prerelease) features over at Google Labs and watch the Keynote over on YouTube.
[watch keynote]

Builder.ai partners with Microsoft for Teams integration and funding

Microsoft continues to invest in AI centric startups, this time with an undisclosed equity investment in Builder.ai The two companies will also partner to make Builder’s “Natasha” AI available in Teams, as well as future integration into the Azure OpenAI Services and other Azure Cognitive Services.

[read more]

Hu.ma.ne debuts it’s new AI powered device, designed to hide in plain sight

The new startup made their public debut via a TED talk earlier this week, showcasing a wearable personal AI assistant. The tech was so subtle, it appears that the audience even missed some of the more impressive tech demonstrations. The device received a cellular call, where the incoming call was projected onto the users hand instead of having a screen. Intentionally subtle, Humane aims to make the tech disappear and make way for more natural, and human interaction.

[watch the TED talk] _~15min
[read more]