Google Debuts AI Tools and Says Tech Is at ‘Exciting Inflection Point’

Google has debuted several of its latest applications for artificial intelligence (AI).

The company is at “an exciting inflection point” in its development of AI, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Wednesday (May 10) blog post highlighting new offerings that were unveiled at the company’s Google I/O 2023 event.

“We’ve been applying AI to make our products radically more helpful for a while,” Pichai said in the post. “With generative AI, we’re taking the next step. With a bold and responsible approach, we’re reimagining all our core products, including Search.”

Newly announced uses of AI in Google products include a “Help me write” feature in Gmail that drafts a full email based on a user’s prompt, an “Immersive View for routes” in Google Maps that provides a bird’s eye view of the trip a user is going to take, and a “Magic Editor” in Google Photos that helps users transform their photos. All three will be rolled out later this year, according to the post.

Google also announced PaLM 2, a new language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities that is available in a wide range of sizes, including one that can work on mobile devices, the post said.

As the company continues to develop Bard, its experiment for conversational AI, it has now made Bard run fully on PaLM 2, per the post.

The firm also committed to build its models so that they include watermarking and metadata in all their AI-generated images, helping viewers identify synthetic images, according to the post.

In Search, Google announced a new Search Generative Experience that will offer a preview of how the company is applying generative AI to Search, the post said.

For the Android ecosystem, the company announced new AI-powered features called Magic Compose, Cinematic Wallpapers and Generative AI Wallpapers, per the post.

“I’ve been reflecting on the big technology shifts that we’ve all been a part of,” Pichai said in the post. “The shift with AI is as big as they come and that’s why it’s so important that we make AI helpful for everyone.”

As PYMNTS reported April 28, “AI” was mentioned more than 200 times during the most recent earnings calls by Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet.