Google was engaged on an AI-powered cellular chatbot app for Gen Z customers that options interactive digital characters, CNBC has discovered.
Nonetheless, the corporate not too long ago “deprioritized” these efforts amid an inside reorganization, in keeping with supplies seen by CNBC. Sometimes, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases.
Known as “Bubble Characters,” the app featured a alternative of speaking digital character that will work together in conversations with Gen Z customers, in keeping with inside documentation considered by CNBC. The corporate had been engaged on it since This autumn 2021.
The app’s description states that it featured “human-like” conversations that “take motion” and are “attention-grabbing for GenZ.” The conversations have been powered by massive language fashions, that are huge knowledge units used to grasp and generate human-like textual content.
“What began out as one thing from a science fiction novel, turned the following technology of human-level dialog,” the app’s description learn.
In an instance seen by CNBC, a cartoon-like character’s pleasant voice engaged in dialog, requested follow-up questions and even supplied relationship recommendation.
The Gen Z chatbot was one amongst a spread of AI-powered tasks utilizing Google’s massive language fashions within the final a number of months. Inside the Assistant group, which works on digital assistant functions or two-way conversations for quite a lot of platforms, executives have prioritized ChatGPT-competitor Bard amid an inside reorganization that included the departure of some key executives. A few of the Bubble Characters workforce members have been requested to place a pause on their work on the Gen Z app to work on Bard forward of its launch, in keeping with correspondence considered by CNBC.
In the meantime, a few of Google’s high AI researchers have left the corporate to start out their very own chatbot corporations, drawing investments in an in any other case sluggish funding atmosphere. Character.AI, a two-year-old firm constructing a companion AI chatbot led by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, raised $150 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in February.
Google didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
