SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet’s Google on Thursday launched a smartphone app for its artificial intelligence chatbot on the Apple App Store, which brings the latest generation of its voice assistant to the mobile operating system. more popular.
The new Gemini app will include Gemini Live, a voice-based feature that allows users to have natural conversations with the chatbot. Apple has already announced that it will integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into a new version of its voice assistant, Siri.
“It’s great for practicing for an interview, asking for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorming and developing creative ideas,” said Brian Marquardt, senior director of project management. products at Google.
Gemini is Google’s answer to ChatGPT, the popular app developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Google initially launched it in February 2023 under the name Bard, and has since added new features while facing controversy.
Google announced the voice feature at an event in August and first added it to phones running its own mobile operating system, Android.
Technical advances in AI, stimulated by the rise in power of language models, have favored the emergence of a new generation of voice assistants that are much more efficient than Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. and Google Assistant.
Google’s Gemini Live replaces Assistant, an eight-year-old product built on older AI technology.
Hundreds of employees on the voice assistant team were laid off in January as part of a reorganization aimed at “improving efficiency”, a company spokesperson said at the time.
Since then, Google has continued its consolidation. Last month, the Gemini app team was integrated into DeepMind, its AI research lab, a move that CEO Sundar Pichai also attributed to improving efficiency.
DeepMind is among the research organizations implementing new techniques to improve AI models, as the traditional approach of building ever-larger models has faced unexpected delays and difficulties, reported Reuters this week.
