Google has begun bringing an understanding of video, audio and photos to its Bard AI chatbot with a new AI model called Gemini. Google Pixel 8 phone owners will be among the first to tap into its new artificial intelligence abilities, but Gemini will come to Gmail and other Google Workspace tools in early 2024.
People in dozens of countries first got access to Gemini with a Bard chatbot update in early December, though only in English. It can provide text-based chat abilities that Google says improves AI abilities in complex tasks like summarizing documents, reasoning, planning and writing programming code. The bigger change with multimedia abilities — for example understanding hand gestures in a video or figuring out the result of a child’s dot-to-dot drawing puzzle — will arrive “soon,” Google said.
Watch this: First Impressions of Gemini: Google’s Newest Major AI Upgrade
The new version spotlights the breakneck pace of advancement in the new generative AI field, where chatbots create their own responses to prompts that we write in plain language rather than arcane programming instructions. Google’s top competitor, OpenAI, stole a march with the launch of ChatGPT a year ago, but Gemini is Google’s third major AI model revision and expects to deliver that technology through products that billions of us use, like search, Chrome, Google Docs and Gmail.
On Wednesday, Google also brought Gemini to programmers, a key community of people who can incorporate the technology into their own software. That’s through the basic Google AI Studio web interface or the more sophisticated Vertex AI. And for usage beyond a free low rate, Google cut prices by a factor of two to four. That could help encourage developers enamored of OpenAI’s programming interface to at least kick the tires on Gemini.
By courting developers, Google is more likely to spread Gemini to the software tools those programmers build for you. Google is building Gemini into its own…
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