• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 21, 2023

Google on Wednesday launched the Best Phones Forever social campaign that imagines a friendship between the two of the most popular phones in the world -- the iPhone and the Pixel. The two in the spots discuss their different compatibilities.

Robert Wong, vice president of Creative Labs at Google, at Cannes announced the campaign and shared examples of how he and his team have used artificial intelligence  (AI) tools developed by Google Research in their work, including piloting a bespoke AI-Reply tool with the campaign.

In a global first for Google, the social-response team will use the reply tool built on AI to help generate replies to user comments on YouTube in the friendly voice of the campaign. The iPhone, which sounds more robotic, and the Pixel phone, which is sweet and sassy, have very distinct voices.

To build the AI-Reply tool, the team used experienced social writers to provide a high-quality set of replies to comments they expected from viewers on YouTube.

They used these human-created comments and replies as a dataset to help prompt Google's Large Language Model PaLM 2, using Google’s prompt engineering tool, MakerSuite. It's similar to the tool Google built for responses in its email platform, Gmail. 

The social-response team will use the PaLM 2 powered AI-Reply tool throughout the campaign to quickly respond to incoming comments.

There are four creative spots, ranging in theme from sketchy wi-fi to the loss of battery power. Each highlights a specific Google Pixel feature.

In the spot titled Lifesaver, the Pixel and iPhone are at the beach. The Pixel notices the iPhone’s battery gauge turned to red, and says: “Oh, no, iPhone, don’t you die on me.” The Pixel lays on the iPhone to share some of its power and recharge it. “Come on, power up, you can do it,” the Pixel says.

When the iPhone comes to life after receiving a charge, it says to Pixel: “Why are you lying on top of me?" The Pixel says: “I’m using my battery to charge your battery. It was empty.”

The iPhone says: "Oh, sorry, I was binging that show about the friendly soccer coach. I didn’t even know that was possible.”