Google’s new chatbot wants to live forever … and fix your computer

By David Nield Published June 28, 2015

1144334 autosave v1 chatbot artificial intelligence — Vladgrin/Shutterstock

We’re at a stage in the evolution of technology where artificial intelligence is starting to become seriously smart — and seriously scary at the same time. Google’s latest efforts at producing an intelligent chatbot have just been published and give a peek into where this kind of smart software is heading in the years to come.

Wired has the story of the new, experimental AI. The key innovation is that it uses a database of movie dialogue rather than conversational rules set down by the programmers. It’s a more flexible form of machine learning and it means the software could eventually come up with new phrases that its coders hadn’t originally thought of.

Recommended Videos

At the center of this kind of technology is the neural network, designed to replicate the neurons in the human brain, and these networks power everything from photo tagging to voice input. The approach has become more common in recent years now that we have the wealth of data and the computing power required to make them effective.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

One of the sample conversations provided by Google researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le is an interestingly disjointed discussion of the meaning of life:

Human: What is the purpose of life?

Machine: To serve the greater good.

Human: What is the purpose of living?

Machine: To live forever.

Human: What is the purpose of existence?

Machine: To find out what happens when we get to the planet Earth.

Human: Where are you now?

Machine: I’m in the middle of nowhere.

Human: What is the purpose of dying?

Machine: To have a life.

Human: What is the purpose of being intelligent?

Machine: To find out what it is.

Human: What is the purpose of emotions?

Machine: I don’t know.

Not exactly the words of something ready to overthrow its human rulers, but Vinyals and Le say it’s an important stepping stone towards chatbots being able to “think outside the box” by learning from dialogue previously spoken by humans. The pair admit their approach lacks consistency but say it could eventually be used to supply automated IT help desk solutions.

“Even though the model has obvious limitations, it is surprising to us that a purely data-driven approach without any rules can produce rather proper answers to many types of questions,” the report concludes. “However, the model may require substantial modifications to be able to deliver realistic conversations.”

[Image courtesy of Vladgrin/Shutterstock.com]

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

Computing

Google expands AI Overviews to over 100 more countries

AI Overviews being shown in Google Search.

Google's AI Overview is coming to a search results page near you, whether you want it to or not. The company announced on Monday that it is expanding the AI feature to more than 100 countries around the world.

Google debuted AI Overview, which uses generative AI to summarize the key points of your search topic and display that information at the top of the results page, to mixed reviews in May before subsequently expanding the program in August. Monday's roll-out sees the feature made available in seven languages — English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish — to users in more than 100 nations (you can find a full list of covered countries here)

Computing

Google’s AI detection tool is now available for anyone to try

Gemini running on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Google announced via a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday that SynthID is now available to anybody who wants to try it. The authentication system for AI-generated content embeds imperceptible watermarks into generated images, video, and text, enabling users to verify whether a piece of content was made by humans or machines.

“We’re open-sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote. “Available freely to developers and businesses, it will help them identify their AI-generated content.”

Computing

This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.