Live From Paris: Google unveils its AI strategy and NORA

Bard is Google's answer to ChatGPT and will be integrated into Google Search. There is also NORA, No One Right Answer. Google offered a glimpse of both technologies during today's livestream.

Google presented its strategy regarding AI today on its Live From Paris event. The company unveiled part of the strategy earlier this week when it announced Bard, its ChatGPT competitor. Google has since then changed the visibility of the recorded livestream to private.

Google employees explained in the livestream how the company would use artificial intelligence in the future to make search natural and intuitive. Besides the already existing abilities to search for text, image and video content, users will soon get more context when they run searches on Google.

Google users will be able to pull information from various sources. One example that Google provided included an image search for pastry and a search for retail locations in the user's area to find bakeries and other shops that sold the particular type of pastry.

Bard, a LaMDA-based chatbot, will add answers to search that use natural language. Google explains that Bard may provide contextual information rather than just facts.

NORA, on the other hand, is Google's answer to user questions that do not have a definitive answer. The technology displays options to the user, which may then be selected. Google showed a search for the question "what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing" and the AI-generated responses that listed a few options to the user.

Google users can pick any of the answers at start, dive deeper into them or go back to the very beginning to look at another possible answer.

Unlike Microsoft, which launched the new Bing already as a limited preview, it is unclear when Google is going to launch NORA and other features that it mentioned during the livestream. Bard is not available publicly as well as this point, but Google plans to make it available to a wider audience in the coming weeks and months.

Google picked Live from Paris as the title of the livestream as it is the location of Google's machine learning team.

Google appears to be on the defensive at the moment as Microsoft's integration of AI components in Bing and also Microsoft Edge are launched already, albeit to limited audiences. Alphabet's stock dropped more than 5% after Google's presentation.

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