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Combining Bard with Google’s digital assistant is likely to put pressure on Apple to upgrade Siri.
Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images
The battle to be your personal digital companion is heating up.
Google on Wednesday announced plans to team up its personal digital assistant software—accessed by voice with a “Hey Google” prompt—with its Bard chatbot. The result should be a smarter tool, capable of doing more than simply retrieving information from the internet, setting timers, and making hands-free phone calls.
The launch is likely to put new pressure on
Apple
to give its own long-time voice assistant Siri a generative-AI upgrade. Meanwhile, OpenAI recently announced a voice interface for its ChatGPT chatbot.
Suddenly, chatbots are actually chatting, and not just about the weather.
“Generative AI is creating new opportunities to build a more intuitive, intelligent personal digital assistant,” Google Vice President or Assistant and Bard Sissie Hsiao said in a blog post. “One that extends beyond voice, understands and adapts to you and handles personal tasks in new ways.”
Hsaio said the tool should make it easier to handle both big and small items on people’s to-do lists, like planning travel, finding details in messages in an in-box, creating a grocery list, or sending a text message.
“Assistant with Bard…combines Bard’s generative and reasoning capabilities with Assistant’s personalized help,” Hsaio wrote. “You can interact with it through text, voice or images – and it can even help take actions for you.”
Alphabet
(ticker: GOOGL) recently expanded Bard’s capabilities to include accessing and analyzing data in Gmail and Google Docs , and Assistant with Bard will likewise be able to access messages and documents. People will be able to use the tool to make complex queries to Gmail, like “catch me up on any important messages I missed this week.”
The service will be tightly coupled with devices based on Google’s Android operating system software.
Take a picture of your new puppy, and you can have Assistant with Bard draft a suggested social media post for you. “Assistant with Bard will use the image as a visual cue, understand the context and help with what you need,” Hsaio said in the post.
She added that Assistant with Bard “is still an early experiment,” rolling out to early testers soon. The new tool will be available in the coming months for both Android and Apple mobile devices, she said.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
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