From The Verge: Google is famous for having a million similar products with confusingly different names and seemingly nothing in common. (Can I interest you in a messaging app?) But when it comes to its AI work, going forward there is only one name that matters: Gemini.
The company announced on Thursday that it is renaming its Bard chatbot to Gemini, releasing a dedicated Gemini app for Android, and even folding all its Duet AI features in Google Workspace into the Gemini brand. It also announced that Gemini Ultra 1.0 — the largest and most capable version of Google’s large language model — is being released to the public.
Gemini’s mobile apps will likely be the place most people encounter the new tool. If you download the new app on Android, it can set Gemini as your default assistant, meaning it replaces Google Assistant as the thing that responds when you say, “Hey Google” or long-press your home button. So far, it doesn’t seem Google is getting rid of Assistant entirely, but the company has been deprioritizing Assistant for a while now, and it clearly believes Gemini is the future. “I think it’s a super important first step towards building a true AI assistant,” says Sissie Hsiao, who runs Bard (now Gemini) at Google. “One that is conversational, it’s multimodal, and it’s more helpful than ever before.”
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