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Google’s chatbot Bard is being further developed in Zurich. The AI race is entering the next round.
Since ChatGPT was released late last year, there has been a race in the field of artificial intelligence. The race also leads to Switzerland: Google’s parent company Alphabet presented the latest version of its chatbot Bard at its Zurich site last week. This should now have access to all Google applications – from YouTube to search to Google Maps. How does Google want to make money like this?
Google as a travel agency
Anyone who plans their vacation online today looks for flights and hotels and reads various travel reports. This requires visiting many separate websites or travel agencies. Google now promises a shortcut here: it is now possible to plan your vacation with a single photo. For example, with a picture of a beautiful beach that you don’t even know.
Google’s chatbot as a fact checker and personal assistant
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In the future, Google’s chatbot would like to help users recognize false facts in the AI system’s answers. Bard answers can be checked with the click of a button with the colorful Google logo. The parts of the answer that the chatbot is sure about are then marked green. The passages where Bard also discovered information on the Internet that could refute this statement are then colored orange.
In another innovation, Google wants to enable users to connect information from their personal lives with Bard’s artificial intelligence. To do this, users can provide the Bard system with targeted data from their personal GMail mailbox and the documents stored in the cloud storage Google Drive for evaluation.
If you upload the photo to the chat robot, Google will not only tell you where the place is, but also how to get there. Including suggestions for flights and hotels, as Sabine Lehmann, computational linguist at Google Switzerland, explains.
Billions in advertising revenue are at stake
This is useful for anyone who has trouble planning vacations. But critical questions also arise. Will Google only show hotels and flights from providers that pay for them? “No, absolutely not, that would be much more complicated!” replies Sabine Lehmann. Bard is currently an experiment. Whether and how money can be made with it is another question. It’s about learning what works and what resonates with the audience.
Legend: Google’s chatbot Bard will in future help to recognize false facts in the AI system’s answers. Keystone/DPA/Arne Dedert
It is clear that Google wants to win the artificial intelligence race in order to retain its market share in search. Google currently has a global market share of over 80 percent with its search engine.
Microsoft wants to compete with Google with its chat robot Bing. Microsoft expects that advertising revenue will increase by two billion dollars for every percentage point of market share that it can steal from Google. The launch of the latest version of Google’s chat robot is the next stage in this race. Billions in advertising revenue are at stake.
Google is arguing with the EU over AI regulation
Google faces resistance not only from competitors like Microsoft, but also from the European Union. New regulation in the area of artificial intelligence should be finalized by the end of the year. Google is in talks with the EU. Worldwide, Google is officially in favor of regulation. But it should be sensible, i.e. business-friendly.
Google and the EU are primarily arguing about how to deal with copyrights. The point is that Google would have to make transparent which data its artificial intelligence was trained with. At the moment the chat robot is fed songs and lyrics, for example from musicians and writers. On this basis, the chatbot then creates new content.
The EU now wants Google to declare which data the artificial intelligence was fed with. The EU wants to better protect the copyrights of musicians and writers.