Picture the scene: You receive a ton of messages from your best friend who is a little over the top when it comes to texting. Your phone is constantly flickering with short, sharp texts while you’re watching one of the best Netflix shows. It’s annoying, but you’re a good friend so you have to fight back. If this situation is a concern for you, Google Bard may have the solution.
that’s why 9to5Google (Opens in a new tab) Discover a Google Messages beta that has a new Bard/Google AI icon in the field where you would normally tap on a text. Now it can be expected that at some point in the near future, Google will allow users to hand over text messaging responsibilities to Bard AI.
Now, this feature is not activated yet in beta, so it may be the case that after some testing, Google decided to scrap such an idea. But, it could also be the next evolution of the likes of Smart Reply, which provides response prompts based on the context of conversations; I’ve found that Smart Reply works fine in Gmail for quick responses.
Of course, Bard is more of an AI chatbot than a machine learning model for quick responses. So integrating it into your messaging app can give it room to handle your conversations for you.
Google Bard speaks for you… What could go wrong?
But I know what you’re thinking: “It could go terribly wrong very quickly.” And I tend to agree. While this new wave of AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can provide some great answers to queries when enough specific information is fed in, they can also go hilariously wrong.
The last thing you want is for, say, a chatbot to confuse your partner with your parents or your boss with your best friend. We all have different ways of interacting with different people, especially in text where it’s hard to communicate nuance and tone.
Google will likely need to train Bard a lot before they are given the freedom to respond to messages. This likely means that users will need to hand over some of their personal information and texts, so that the AI can learn to respond as they do.
My guess is that if Bard is integrated into messaging apps, it will be somewhat limited in how it responds to blocking social snaps.
But it is another indication that we live in a time when artificial intelligence could realistically be a real part of our lives, which is both exciting and scary at the same time. *cough* skynet *cough*.
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