Google unveils new AI tools, chatbot, mobile devices

ISTANBUL

US tech giant Google unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) tools, chatbot, mobile devices and other innovations during its I/O developers conference Wednesday.

The company said it built a new general-purpose language model, named PaLM 2, which can respond to human inputs by generating human-like texts.

Google DeepMind Vice President Zoubin Ghahraman said the new language model, which is being used by around 20 new Google products already, can perform natural language generation, reasoning in language translation, in addition to undertaking tasks in math and software development.

The firm said it is also upgrading its Bard artificial intelligence chatbot, which is in competition with Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI ChatGPT.

Bard, which is moved to the new PaLM 2 language model, will be made available with new capabilities. While the chatbot already responds to questions in English, Japanese and Korean, it will soon expand to 40 languages soon.

Bard will also be able to bring information to users from other Google services, such as Gmail, Maps, Docs and Sheets, the company said.

Google Maps’ Immersive View will provide users to see their route with AI-generated visuals, giving them real-time information about weather, traffic and other data.

The online office suite Workspace, which is a collection of cloud computing and collaboration tools, will soon help users to generate documents and spreadsheets using PaLM 2.

As for mobile devices, the company introduced its first foldable handheld, Google Pixel Fold, boasting it as the thinnest foldable phone in the market with a 5.8-inch (14.7 centimeters) screen folding out to 7.6-inch (19.3 centimeters) display with a price tag of $1,799.

Google also unveiled its budget Pixel 7a Android phone that costs $499, and Pixel Tablet that starts at $499.

• AI
• Artificial Intelligence
• Google
• PaLM 2
• Pixel Fold