After years of hesitation, Google is preparing its competitor software for the currently popular text machine ChatGPT for public use.
Google users should be able to interact “very soon” with such language systems, among other things as a supplement to web searches, said CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday.
The Internet giant has long been developing software based on artificial intelligence that can talk to people.
As early as spring 2018, Google demonstrated a program that called restaurants to make a reservation - and was not recognized as a computer.
Criticism was immediately raised that such technology could be misused.
Google has had its voice software used internally by employees for the past few years, but shied away from a broad market launch due to the risks.
Microsoft invests billions
But at the end of last year, the developer company OpenAI made its ChatGPT software public, which can formulate texts in seconds that could also have been written by a human being.
The technology caused a stir, but also raised concerns: After all, you can use it to try to cheat at school or university, or to create false information on a large scale for distribution on the Internet.
ChatGPT also sometimes gives wrong answers, but this is not recognizable for users.
Google will be ambitious but responsible when releasing its voice software, Pichai assured.
The Internet group was seen strategically under pressure from ChatGPT.
Archrival Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and will integrate the start-up's software into its cloud platform.
According to media reports, Microsoft's search engine Bing should also be linked to it.
Microsoft lags far behind Google in the web search business, despite years of effort.
In the past quarter, Google felt the slack in the online advertising market.
The advertising business for the search engine and video platform YouTube fell by around 3.6 percent year-on-year to $59 billion.
However, gains in cloud services and successful foreign exchange deals helped close the gap.