WATCH: Google announcement a damp squib – no new Bard news

Tech giant Google did not really impress with its highly anticipated press conference announcing a bunch of AI-enabled search, Maps, and Translate updates, as part of its Google presents.

The press conference was broadcast live on YouTube from the company’s office in Paris, France on Wednesday.

The Google demo included references to many products that are still unavailable, along with updates to some existing products.

Competition

Many pundits were expecting a decisive move against ChatGPT and the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, but Google declined to offer much new information about its Bard conversational AI search tool, powered by the LaMDA model.

Updates

On stage in front of a small in-person audience in Paris, Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan and Google Search VP Liz Reid took turns showing a series of products 

Raghavan, who is responsible for Search, said “search is still our biggest moonshot,” adding that the “moon keeps moving.”

Raghavan said the past few years have seen huge breakthroughs in the use and application of artificial intelligence — and AI holds major promise for people around the world. 

“AI already powers Google’s core products that help billions of people every day.”

Google shared some of the ways AI makes products even more helpful, including some of their recently launched features,

Watch the Google Live for Paris

Search

The company said AI is making it possible to search in new languages, with new inputs (like searching with your camera, or even humming a tune) and even multiple inputs at once.

“And now thanks to multi-search, you can search with images and text at the same time with the Google app.”

Translate

Google said it is continuing to push state-of-the-art multi-language-driven translation.

“Now with 133 languages supported. And we’ve expanded the number of languages available on-device in the Translate app as well, with 33 new available to use whether you have a network connection or are traveling without one, including Basque, Corsican, Hawaiian, Hmong, Kurdish, Latin, Luxembourgish, Sundanese, Yiddish and Zulu, among others.”

Maps

Google also updated its maps, which it said uses AI to analyze data and provide up-to-date information about traffic conditions and delays.

“Now with immersive view, Google Maps fuses together billions of Street View and aerial images to create a rich, digital model of the world.”

With AI, we use 2D images of a venue to generate a highly accurate, 3D representation that models the true complexity of what a place is like,” it said.

Gmail

On Gmail, Google said its spam-filtering capabilities are powered by AI, and block nearly 10 million spam emails every minute.

“They also prevent more than 99.9% of spam, phishing attempts and malware from reaching you.”

Bard

Raghavan spent some time going over Bard’s features during the Paris press conference, but he revealed nothing new.

After the event, Google shares plunged 8%, after Reuters reported that a Twitter advertisement for the new Bard service included inaccurate information about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system.

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