The next-generation Pixel smartphone series was introduced by Google on Wednesday. It will feature more artificial intelligence technologies that can write captions for pictures that can also be edited by the technology.
Google’s decision to incorporate more artificial intelligence (AI) into its products is a step in the right direction toward the push company leaders hinted they were making at their annual developer’s conference five months ago.
During the event on Wednesday in New York, Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of devices and services, said, “Our focus is on making AI more helpful for everyone in a way that is bold and responsible.” Osterloh hailed the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones as a conduit for having “AI in your hand,” as if to remove any confusion over Google’s present ambitions.
The 7-year-old Google Assistant will soon be able to use the business’s recently developed AI chatbot, Bard, to carry out tasks. Just two weeks after Google started linking the AI chatbot to other well-known services like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube, the firm has now expanded access to Bard.
To allay concerns about AI combing through potentially sensitive data as it strives to learn more about language and people, Google is letting each user select whether to enable Bard to communicate with its other services.
The Bard-backed assistant is said to be able to scan a photo shot on a phone using Google’s Android platform and provide a snappy caption appropriate for uploading on social media as one of its new talents. The Bard-backed Google Assistant will first only be accessible to a test audience before it is progressively made available on an opt-in basis to more users of the most recent Pixel phones, as Google has been doing with most of its AI gambits.
The majority of the additional technology in the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which were announced on Wednesday, will be identical to what was already available in last year’s versions, as has become customary throughout the industry.
Improved cameras, including more AI-powered editing tools that will mostly be accessible on the Pixel 8 Pro, will be one of the new phones’ primary selling points. The AI features will be able to enhance photographs, enlarge certain portions of them, replace faces from other photos in group shots, and remove objects and people from pictures.
With the beginning costs for both the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro jumping by $100 over last year’s equivalent models, Google is betting that the new AI twists brought to this year’s selection will be sufficient to justify a price hike.
When they go on sale in stores the following week, the Pixel 8 will cost $700 and the Pixel 8 Pro will cost $1,000 as a result. When its most recent models were released last month, Apple increased the starting price of its top-end iPhone by $100, warning that inflationary pressures are beginning to force up the costs of products that have grown to be indispensable components of modern life.
The Pixel 8 Pro will also be able to take people’s temperatures, which could be a selling point when different COVID strains develop in a post-pandemic world. To allow that functionality in the United States, Google is still attempting to obtain regulatory approval. The Honor Play 4 Pro, a 2020 smartphone produced by Huawei, may also check for fevers, so Google isn’t really innovating here.
Despite receiving generally favorable reviews, since Google started producing the phones seven years ago, the Pixel phones have scarcely made a difference in a market dominated by Samsung and Apple. However, they have recently begun to get a little more momentum, according to research firm International Data Corp. Pixel’s share of the high-end smartphone market is now hovering around 4%, up from less than 1% three years ago.
