• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 4, 2023

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has created new opportunities to build a more intuitive, intelligent, personalized digital assistant, especially from companies like Google that have multiple platforms in which to pull data to support answers to queries and questions.

Google on Wednesday announced the addition of Bard to Google Assistant, as it celebrates its 25th year as a search service in 2023. Bard is a natural-language processing and machine-learning technology based on Google's Large language model (LLM), LaMDA. It's intended to function like a chatbot for those looking for answers, but brands can use the technology to market or advertise product and services.

Assistant with Bard combines generative and reasoning capabilities of Bard, which known more than 20 coding languages, with Assistant’s personalized help. Text, voice or image interactions are available today, with the ability for it to take actions for users. In the coming months it will become available on Android and iOS mobile devices.

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page co-founded and launched Google in 1998, the two had ambitions to create a search engine that would “organize the world’s information” online and help people make sense it.

During the past 25 years, Google has become more than a search engine. Today it maps the world and brings AI into everyday tools. It also helps brands advertise and market products and services to reach consumers.

There are 12 billion visual searches conducted using Google Lens monthly and 133 languages that Google Translate supports, with 200 estimated years of typing searches that autocomplete saves daily, and on average 70 billion daily views on YouTube Shorts, as of September 2023.

Google also said today it is working to build a more contextually helpful experience on Android phones.

For example, take a photo of a puppy to post to social media. Hover the Assistant with Bard overlay on top of the photo and ask it to write a social post.

Assistant with Bard will use the image as a visual cue, understand the context and help to create the post. This conversational overlay is a new way to interact with phones. Similar to Bard and Assistant, Google said it will be built with privacy in mind.