Microsoft Plans to Add ChatGPT to Bing

 Can ChatGPT be successfully be integrated into services like search engines?  Implications?  Will public uses be useful, dangerous? 

Microsoft Plans to Add ChatGPT to Bing Search Engine: Report

By Eric HAL Schwartz on January 4, 2023   in Voicebot.ai

Microsoft will incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, according to a report from The Information. The OpenAI synthetic media chatbot will serve to answer questions directly instead of the traditional link list and could debut as soon as the end of March in an attempt to come out ahead of Google’s far more widely used search engine.

BING CHATGPT

Bing has always run far behind Google as a search engine, even as a term for searching online. ChatGPT’s recent explosive popularity could change that equation. Microsoft’s $1 billion investment into OpenAI includes an exclusive claim to enterprise applications like a ChatGPT-based search engine so it would have an edge over Google. The idea seems to be an alternative version of Bing where users could converse with ChatGPT and get direct answers, including on recent developments, with sources cited and hyperlinked. The currently available version of ChatGPT explicitly states it is trained only on data as recent as a year ago. Microsoft had been supposedly working on a chatbot for Bing as long ago as 2021, but this appears to be a different product entirely.

Microsoft has already begun incorporating other OpenAI tools into Bing. The tech giant began making the DALL-E text-to-image service part of Microsoft 365 through the new Designer app and the upcoming Image Creator tool for both Bing and Edge. Google has plenty of large language model projects of its own in the works through Deepmind, but hasn’t made anything like ChatGPT available to the public.

CHATBOT SEARCH

Microsoft would also not be the first on the scene with a ChatGPT-style search engine, although certainly the largest and first with ChatGPT actually backing it. You.com recently launched the YouChat search engine, capable of sourcing current events through generative AI. You.com is smaller than Bing, let alone Google, but it does demonstrate there’s at least some interest in a search engine with a conversational format. ChatGPT was already seeing potential rivals in GPT-3-derived chatbots, such as Jasper Chat, a chatbot format for Jasper’s own generative AI engine. Google may face some real competition in the search sector for the first time in a very long time if Bing and others experimenting with this approach take off.  ...

Walgreens Automates Vaccine Scheduling with AI Bot

Interesting example here of integrating basic interactions and more complex data based decisions.   

Walgreens automates COVID-19 vaccine scheduling     By Dan Berthiaume - 03/10/2021 in Chainstorage

Walgreens is extending access to COVID-19 vaccine information and scheduling with an artificial intelligence (AI)-based bot.

The drugstore giant, which is receiving a weekly federal allocation of more than 480,000 vaccine doses for distribution across 26 U.S. states and jurisdictions, is now deploying an intelligent conversational voicebot from Nuance Communications. The voicebot will help customers schedule their COVID-19 vaccine appointments 24 hours a day, seven days a week, beyond Walgreens’ existing web-based vaccine portal.

Walgreens customers can now call 1-800-Walgreens or a Walgreens store and speak in English or Spanish to the Nuance voicebot to get answers to COVID-19 questions, confirm eligibility according to applicable guidelines, and schedule their vaccine appointments wherever vaccines are available. The Nuance solution also sends the customer an SMS text to confirm appointments after the call. ... '

Upcoming Voice AI with Clouds: Podcast

Of interest, the future of Voice nd AI.   Will be following.

Voice Talks Rises to the Clouds for February 25 Episode by Eric Hal Schwartz in Voicebot.ai

Modev’s VOICE Talks Presented by Google Assistant will peer into the future for its latest episode on the evolution of voice technology. The new episode is titled “Starting a New Decade in Voice and AI” and will stream live on Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Eastern, hosted as always by Google Assistant’s co-lead of global product partnerships Sofia Altuna.

AI INSIGHT

Altuna will start off the show’s discussions and presentations with a broad overview of the combination of voice tech, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence that are set to elevate the current state of technology before introducing the first of her guests, technical director of AI for Google Cloud Ashwin Ram. Ram will go over the way cloud computing supports voice technology and how it is being used to solve problems in the field. Following Ram, Cobalt CEO Jeff Adams and XAPP vice president Michael Meyers will zero in on those challenges,. They will lay out how voice and AI are adapting to avoid issues before they even arise, with each of their companies developing conversational AI tech to accommodate those potential problems.

“There’s so much we don’t know that makes the future fundamentally impossible to predict,” Adams said in a statement. “But that’s the joy of it. The future is in our blindspot and that makes it an adventure. We are going to create it and see it when it gets here.”   ... ' 

Your Brand in a Voice Centered World

Voice and Brand.    What ties them together to make them work, engage.   Stll not ure if the works unless your voice recognition and delivery is near perfect.  Good thoughts on connection if that is the case.

What Does It Mean for Your Brand in a Voice-Centered World?
Published on May 3, 2018
By Dave Isbitski of Amazon

Chief Evangelist, Alexa at Amazon. Keynote Speaker, Podcaster, Voicebot.ai Top Influencers in Voice 2019

Following
In my role at Amazon today, I have the absolute pleasure of talking directly with customers, developers and brands every day. Some of you have already seen my recent talks involving voice and brands right here on LinkedIn: Amazon's David Isbitski on Machine Learning, A.I. and "Voice-Enabled Everything" Those talks started great discussions, enough that I felt it would be good to create a LinkedIn article. I’m going to use this article to write about a favorite topic of mine, brand experience, and what that means as we move to a voice-first world.


The first thing I often do when talking with brands is to take a step back and reflect on how they interact with their customer today. In fact, this was the same discussion I had years ago when I was helping to build mobile apps for brands at Microsoft. In early mobile, there was a fear that the essence of the brand, which flowed so well on a website, would not come across in the mobile space. Particularly if the mobile app was defined by the platforms own design guidelines: at the time this meant iOS, Android and Windows Phone. What quickly became apparent was those design guidelines were not barriers, but guardrails intended to help create a consistent, and enjoyable experience for all users on that mobile platform. It didn’t limit the creativity of your imagination, or what you could do in a mobile app, it helped unlock it by removing technical barriers. But, it did mean an entirely new way of thinking about those customer interactions was required. The same is true with voice and conversational design.  ... " 

In-Car Voice Assistants

A look at voice assistants and the Connected Car

In-Car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Webinar Replay with Cerence and Full    By Bret Kinsella 

Last week, Cerence CEO Sanjay Dhawan joined Voicebot’s Bret Kinsella to record a webinar on the findings of the recent national survey on voice assistant use in the car. Below is the video recording which includes responses to several questions from the audience during the webinar. There were many questions that Sanjay and Bret did not get to in the recording so we captured some written responses to many of those below. If you have additional questions feel free to post them on Twitter to @bretkinsella or @CerenceInc.   ... "  (53 minutes)  

Voicebot Market Data

I see that Voicebot.ai has a market data section that covers generally the use of Voice assistants and related topics, like the overall market and data about individual vendors are being used by consumers.  Worth a look.

Voice Landscape in Europe

 Some good alternative work ongoing in Europe:

Voice Landscape in Europe from All About Voice Conference – Voicebot Podcast Ep 119   From Voicebot.ai  by Bret Kinsella 

This week’s interviews were conducted onsite at the All About Voice Conference in Munich, Germany. That enabled us to capture the European (and Isreali and even some U.S.) perspective on voice assistant adoption. The five guests come from France, Germany, Isreal, and Poland. We discuss European voice assistant adoption, voice UX design principles, open source versus proprietary software approaches, voice assistant experiments in primary education, voice in podcasting and media, and enterprise voice adoption. Guests appear in this order:  .... ' 

Stats on Voicebot Assistant Use from Voicebot.ai

Continued rise here by 39%.   A continued opportunity to leverage the advance of a new retail and communication channel.

U.S. Smart Speaker Ownership Rises 40% in 2018 to 66.4 Million and Amazon Echo Maintains Market Share Lead Says New Report from Voicebot    By  Bret Kinsella

U.S. smart speaker owners rose 40% in 2018 to reach 66.4 million with total smart speakers in use rising to 133 million

New smart speaker sales vaulted ownership to 26.2% of U.S. adults, up from less than 20% in 2017

Amazon Echo maintains a 61% market share among smart speaker owners while Google Home closed the gap by rising 5.5% to a 24% share

Smart speaker ownership is driving more use voice assistants on smartphones  ... "