Google delays EU launch of its AI chatbot after privacy regulator raises concerns

Google to rebrand AI Chatbot ‘Bard’ as ‘Gemini’, will have a free and paid app launching soon

We might even have a potential release date for the new personal assistant as well. According to a post from Android expert Mishaal Rahman, the source code in the Pixel Tips app shows a March 2024 date that’ll supposedly be timed with a planned Pixel feature drop. This, by and large changes, the personal assistant experience previously on offer by the current Google Assistant. Google Assistant, as it stands now, primarily functions as a reactive tool, responding to direct queries and commands. However, the integration with Bard marks a shift towards a more proactive and contextual understanding.

Bard should outline all of the specific features it’s currently using for you. Google even got YouTube star Mark Rober to test the Gemini Pro capabilities in Bard to help him craft a huge paper airplane. For now, you can simply interact with Bard like you would ChatGPT to get help with ideas, creativity, and generating content. Here’s everything you need to know about how to use Google Gemini in Bard and a couple of other Google services and products. For now, you’ll only be able to scratch the surface of what the AI model can do, primarily through Google’s Bard chatbot and the new Pixel 8 Pro smartphone.

Gemini Pro in Google products

Another way to use it is to insert images and have the AI identify specific objects and locations. Users are required to make a Gmail account and be at least 18 years old to access Gemini. Business Insider compiled a Q&A that answers everything you may wonder about Google’s generative AI efforts. When looking for insights, AI features in Search can distill information to help you see the big picture. The firm pledged $20 million to support responsible AI initiatives, particularly those revolving around the impact of AI in the spheres of labor, economy, security, productivity, and emerging technologies. Gemini Advanced is part of the Google One AI Premium plan subscription service that costs $19.99 per month in the United States.

Google discloses that it collects conversations, location, feedback and usage information. The Google Privacy Policy claims Google uses collected data to develop, provide, maintain and improve services, and to provide personal services such as content and ads. Customers can delete information from their account using My Google Activity, or by deleting Google products or their Google accounts. Because of OpenAI’s close partnership with Microsoft, ChatGPT can be used through Windows apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. ChatGPT also includes an API that developers can use to integrate OpenAI LLMs into third-party software. It lacks a Save button, but users can copy and paste answers from ChatGPT into another application.

This plan includes all of the benefits of the existing Google One Premium plan (2TB of storage, exclusive Google Photos editing features, Google Meet premium video features and Google Calendar’s enhanced appointment scheduling). In addition, they will get access to the more advanced model wherever Gemini is available. Soon, they will also get access to Gemini in Google Workspace, which will likely be a Microsoft Copilot-like experience, though Google didn’t want to provide any details about this yet. Starting today, Bard will use a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and more. It will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories, and we plan to expand to different modalities and support new languages and locations in the near future. Smartphone users can download the Google Gemini app for Android or the Google app with built-in AI capabilities for the iPhone.

“All of Microsoft products started as an on-premises-based software product and then moved to the cloud,” Baier continued. Meanwhile, Google started with a cloud-based architecture, which will help it have a more integrated experience for generative AI tools, he added. Coinciding with the expansion are new features focused on fine-tuning Bard’s responses and beefing up the chatbot’s potential for productivity. Some were telegraphed and previewed in early May, but today marks their broad rollout. Also, the new Bard AI assistant UI will be placed on top of the Discover page of the Google search app. The button is rather a slider switch, and it is unclear if the button rests there to remind you to check out the Bard AI assistant or if it will have a permanent place there.

Google initially announced Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, on Feb. 6, 2023, with a vague release date. It opened access to Bard on March 21, 2023, inviting users to join a waitlist. On May 10, 2023, Google removed the waitlist and made Bard available in more than 180 countries and territories. Almost precisely a year after its initial announcement, Bard was renamed Gemini. After announcing its family of Gemini models last week and bringing it to its Bard chatbot experience, Google is now bringing Gemini to developers by launching a slew of new and updated services today.

Earlier this week, Google officially unveiled Bard, its new AI chatbot service that’s designed to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The launch was far from smooth, with Google shares taking a dive after the new service made a factual error in a promotional video. Google came under heavy scrutiny for it, and employees seem to be just as disappointed, pinning the blame on CEO Sundar Pichai. Early testers can try the 1 million token context window at no cost during the testing period, though they should expect longer latency times with this experimental feature. In line with our AI Principles and robust safety policies, we’re ensuring our models undergo extensive ethics and safety tests.

Gemini in smart home devices

For a long time, we’ve wanted to build a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world. AI that feels less like a smart piece of software and more like something useful and intuitive — an expert helper or assistant. According to Google, Bard Advanced is designed to be more “complex” and have “better responses.” It will be powered by the soon-to-be-released Gemini Ultra, Google’s multimodal large language model, which is set for an “early 2024” release. Bard is currently running on Gemini Pro, which is meant to compete with GPT-3.5, with Ultra touted by Google as a model that will compete with, and in some cases even surpass, GPT-4. The incoming integration of Bard and Google Assistant will bring the advanced functionalities of Bard to Google Home and mobile devices – including iOS and Android. Launched in 2016, Google Assistant offered users basic AI features with subsequent improvements, allowing the tool to engage in two-way interactions.

And while GPT-3.5 was only trained on data up to January 2022, GPT-4o has been trained on data up to October 2023. Google has officially introduced its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard in India. At Google I/O 2023, the search giant announced that its new tool will be available in over 180 countries.

Galaxy S25 vs. Pixel 9: Battle of the base model

Besides the updates to ChatGPT and Google Gemini, other companies are working on AI projects. These include AI21 Labs’ Wordtune, Anthropic’s Claude, Glean, Jasper, Open Assistant and Writesonic’s Chatsonic. Many productivity applications and SaaS products also incorporate GenAI assistants. ChatGPT is multimodal, meaning users can use images and voice to prompt the chatbot. ChatGPT Voice — available on iOS and Android phones — lets users hold conversations with ChatGPT, which can respond in one of five AI-generated voices. Gemini is rolling out on Android and iOS phones in the U.S. in English starting today, and will be fully available in the coming weeks.

We designed Gemini to be natively multimodal, pre-trained from the start on different modalities. Then we fine-tuned it with additional multimodal data to further refine its effectiveness. This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models — and its capabilities are state of the art in nearly every domain.

However, the upgraded Gemini experience “Ultra” will be rolling out to numerous Google properties in the coming months. Plus, it’s trained to be multimodal from the ground up, even if you can only access the text capabilities for now. The system will be able to interact with video, images, and audio in the coming months.

With Bard, Google aims to solidify its presence in the AI chatbot space while maintaining its dominance in the search engine market. Google has unveiled Bard, an AI chatbot designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s chatbot in their Bing search engine. 9to5Google dug into the Google app and discovered code references to Assistant with Bard making its first appearance on new Pixel 8 and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S24. At the Made by Google event in early October, the company introduced Assistant with Bard, an AI helper for phones — and now we have more details on which devices will get access first. Considering, Google has not updated its statement about the upcoming release, we can assume it will still be next month. Samsung’s Unpacked Event unveiled a bunch of exciting new products, including the highly-anticipated Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra.

Google Releases Bard AI Chatbot Amid Competition With ChatGPT – Forbes

Google Releases Bard AI Chatbot Amid Competition With ChatGPT.

Posted: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Every technology shift is an opportunity to advance scientific discovery, accelerate human progress, and improve lives. I believe the transition we are seeing right now with AI will be the most profound in our lifetimes, far bigger than the shift to mobile or to the web before it. AI has the potential to create opportunities — from the everyday to the extraordinary — for people everywhere. It will bring new waves of innovation and economic progress and drive knowledge, learning, creativity and productivity on a scale we haven’t seen before.

Google Gemini is multimodal — it understands audio, video and computer code as well as text. Google has paused Gemini’s image generation feature because of inaccuracies, however. Google’s statement disclosing the pause pledged to re-release an improved image generation feature soon. Announced at Google I/O 2024,Gemini Advanced users can create Gems, custom chatbots powered by Gemini models. Gems can be generated from natural language descriptions — for example, “You’re my running coach. All Gemini models were trained to be natively multimodal — that is, able to work with and analyze more than just text.

Back then, Google said Gemini Ultra, the flagship model, would launch to consumers in early 2024 after a round of private tests. While the company didn’t say so explicitly, the understanding at the time was already that the Ultra model would be part of a paid plan, dubbed Bard Advanced at the time and now renamed to Gemini Advanced. The company is also launching a new Gemini app for Android and bringing it to the Google app on iOS — and on Android, you can now replace your Google Assistant with Gemini, too. As for developers who want API access to the Ultra model, Google said it’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. Almost exactly a year after first introducing its (rushed) efforts to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company is retiring the name and rebranding Bard as Gemini, the name of its family of foundation models.

• Google’s management has been moving fast to get Bard out the door after the company was caught off guard by the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year.
• On Android, it also recently became possible to bring up the Gemini overlay on top of any app to ask questions about what’s on the screen (e.g., a YouTube video).
• So the DPC is presumably intending to chip any learnings into that effort — where/if appropriate.
• The simplified website specifies that the tool is still an “experiment” and can throw inaccurate information.

In addition, Google will be putting Bard Advanced through additional safety checks prior to its launch. The version of Bard with Gemini Pro will first become available in English in more than 170 countries and territories worldwide, with more languages and countries, including the EU and U.K., soon. Initially, Bard will be upgraded with a specifically tuned version of Gemini Pro. Next year, Google will introduce Bard Advanced, which will give users access to the best AI model, starting with Gemini Ultra. So it’s notable there’s no hard ban from Ireland now; just an unquantified degree of delay which is being explicitly linked to inadequate information being provided by Google (plus some unspecified “data protection questions”).

Other new features include text-to-speech capabilities for image editing and art. The new API has audio streaming applications to assist with native tool use and improved latency. Google plans to roll this new model out to a wider audience in January 2025.

Compared to the earlier version of MakerSuite/AI Studio, this updated edition feels quite a bit more substantial. Among other things, it will offer support for both Gemini Pro and the Gemini Pro Vision model, allowing developers to work with both text and imagery (though not for creating images). This strategic move is to adopt new AI technology while preserving the profitability of its search engine business. Bard is designed as a complementary experience to Google Search, allowing users to check its responses or explore sources across the web. Then, Google proceeded to sit on the tech for almost two years, while competitors like OpenAI, Stability, and Midjourney marched out commercially available image generators in scores.

Google Bard release date: confirmed

However, there are important factors to consider, such as bans on LLM-generated content or ongoing regulatory efforts in various countries that could limit or prevent future use of Gemini. At launch on Dec. 6, 2023, Google said Gemini would comprise a series of different model sizes, each designed for a specific set of use cases and deployment environments. As of Dec. 13, 2023, Google enabled access to Gemini Pro in Google Cloud Vertex AI and Google AI Studio. For code, a version of Gemini is used to power the Google AlphaCode 2 generative AI coding technology. As mentioned above, Bard currently uses Google Gemini “Pro,” the mid-level version of Google’s AI model.

In 2024, Bard Advanced will debut, which will be a new experience powered by Gemini’s most capable model. With Gemini Ultra, as it’s called, the AI can understand and act on different types of information, including text, images, audio, video and code, and it has multimodal reasoning capabilities. Gemini Ultra can also understand, explain and generate high-quality code in popular programming languages, Google says, in addition to understanding audio and video content. Nano powers features on some of Google’s Android devices and can help make the devices more accessible. For example, the Google Pixel 8 Pro includes the TalkBack feature, which helps those with low vision interact with their device using touch and speech.

Additionally, the leak also mentioned the announcement of the previously confirmed paid Advanced tier and a new Android app. “This is the biggest single quality improvement of Bard since we’ve launched,” said Sissie Hsiao, VP and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, when introducing the Bard upgrade in a press briefing. Natasha is a senior reporter for TechCrunch, joining September 2012, based in Europe. She has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC.

We’re excited by the amazing possibilities of a world responsibly empowered by AI — a future of innovation that will enhance creativity, extend knowledge, advance science and transform the way billions of people live and work around the world. Starting on December 13, developers and enterprise customers can access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI. We’re already starting to experiment with Gemini in Search, where it’s making our Search Generative Experience (SGE) faster for users, with a 40% reduction in latency in English in the U.S., alongside improvements in quality. Today, we’re a step closer to this vision as we introduce Gemini, the most capable and general model we’ve ever built.

Bard in Google Messages could also help to translate conversations and identify images, as well as explore interests. The code suggests it could provide book recommendations and recipe ideas, too. Secondly, you can access components of the Gemini Pro experience via the Google AI Studio API or through the Google Cloud Vertex solution. Vertex AI is a full platform offering purpose-built MLOPs tools for ML engineers and data scientists. Once enabled, you’ll be able to see Gemini Nano-powered suggestions in the Gboard keyboard subscription strip. Currently, this is only available for US customers in WhatsApp, but Google plans to extend it to more regions and apps.