It’s the technology at the heart of most new connected product and service announcements this year. Google presented its new range of Pixel smartphones on Wednesday, October 4, with a professional model powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Featuring a powerful chip, Google’s Pixel 8 Pro is said to run some AI functions on the device itself, instead of having data processed remotely on servers, a process that requires a lot of bandwidth .
“This is a major breakthrough,” Rick Osterloh, the group’s vice president of devices and services, said at a marketing event in New York. “The Pixel 8 Pro will be the first smartphone equipped with its own generative AI system for images.”
Improve photo editing
In the immediate future, this technology will improve existing tools, such as editing photographs, but the objective is that it will soon perform other functions.
Particularly in terms of helping human productivity, a market in full upheaval since generative AI makes it possible to produce all kinds of content (texts, images, sounds) on a simple request in everyday language.
Large technology companies, led by Google and Microsoft, are in a race to be the first to deploy intuitive tools intended to save humans time.
Bard features
Pixel phones will thus test features of Bard, Google’s generative AI chatbot, equivalent to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Ultimately, this mobile assistant should provide real-time help, such as choosing the best route for a hike, summarizing emails or organizing a birthday party.
“This is one step closer to our vision of building the world’s most useful personal assistant,” said Monika Gupta, a Google vice president. “It combines personalized help with reasoning and (content) generation capabilities,” she detailed. “It can hear, it can speak, it can see and it can even perform tasks that help you right on the device you always have with you.” OpenAI recently equipped ChatGPT with hearing and speech.
Meta presents its new chatbots
Last week, Meta (Facebook, Instagram) presented new AI chatbots, with different personalities, capable of giving advice and interacting with users.
Amazon, for its part, announced an update to its Alexa voice assistant so that it works in a more human and “intelligent” way. Like the other companies, Google has clarified that many of these new AI features are at an early stage and will be improved gradually.
The Californian group also plans to equip the Pixel 8 Pro with a sensor to measure body temperature, awaiting approval from the American authorities.