By Kenrick Cai

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet’s Google released a smartphone app for its artificial intelligence chatbot on Apple’s App Store on Thursday, introducing the latest generation of the voice assistant to the popular mobile operating system.

The new Gemini app will include Gemini Live, a voice-based feature that allows users to have natural conversations with the chatbot. Apple has already said it will include OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a revamped version of its voice assistant Siri.

“This is great when you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm and come up with creative ideas,” Brian Marquardt, Google’s senior director of product management, said in a statement. .

Gemini is Google’s answer to ChatGPT, the popular app developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Google first launched the feature under the name Bard in February 2023 and has since added more features amid controversy.

Google announced the voice feature during an event in August and added it first to phones running its own mobile operating system, Android.

Technical advances in artificial intelligence, spurred by the rise of large language models, have spurred the emergence of a new generation of voice assistants that are far more capable than Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant.

Google’s Gemini Live replaces Assistant, an eight-year-old product built using older AI technology.

Hundreds of employees on the Voice Assistant team were laid off in January as part of a restructuring aimed at “becoming more efficient,” a company spokesperson said at the time.

Google has since consolidated further. Last month, Gemini folded its applications team into AI research lab DeepMind, a move that CEO Sundar Pichai also attributed to increased efficiency.

DeepMind is among research organizations applying new techniques to improve AI models as the traditional approach to building increasingly larger models faces unexpected delays and challenges, Reuters reported this week.

(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)