• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 10, 2023

Google kicked off its I/O developer conference Wednesday with a slew of announcements related to artificial intelligence (AI).

"We are reimagining all of our core products, including search," said Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's and Google’s CEO, at the start of the conference.

At the Google I/O developer conference, the company announced a new integrated search-results page, with an AI snapshot to provide the important details.

The new generative AI capabilities that make search and shopping smarter and simpler on Bard integrate ranking and safety systems that Google developers have fine-tuned for decades, the company said.

Search is supercharged -- meaning that users will never need to restart a search to get additional answers. In this presentation the company did not discuss advertising or how brands will generate revenue from change, as it focused on how developers will use generative AI.  

Under the snapshot of search information, users will have the ability to ask more questions in a conversational mode. Not just for commercial search, but enterprise search.

“It’s not only an enabler, but a big product shift,” Pichai said.  

Google also launched PaLM 2, its newest large language model (LLM). It will power Google’s updated Bard chat tool, the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

PaLM 2 will function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features the company is announcing today. PaLM 2 is available to developers through Google’s PaLM API, Firebase and on Colab.

Integration of its Bard AI into Maps, Gmail and Search are some of the announcements made today. Bard is now available in 180 countries and territories. English. Japanese and Korean are available today.

The announcement of a partnership with Adobe integrates AI image generation into Bard. Users can describe an image to Bard. Firefly then takes the input to create an image in the Google Bard platform.

Creators will have the ability to edit generated images in Bard through Adobe Express.

A partnership with Salesforce was also announced. 

Google Maps will get an Immersive View for Routes feature in select cities. The feature brings all of the information that a user may need into one place like details about traffic simulations, bike lanes, complex intersections, parking and more.

Immersive View for Routes will begin to roll out for Android and iOS in the coming months in 15 cities, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, Florence, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo and Venice.