STORY: Google-parent Alphabet is doubling down on AI.
On Tuesday the tech giant unveiled a slew of new products and prototypes, including a beefed-up version of its Gemini chatbot.
Company chief Sundar Pichai spoke at Google's annual developer conference in Mountain View, California:
"We see this is how we will make the most progress against our mission: organizing the world's information across every input, making it accessible via any output, and combining the world's information with the information in your world in a way that's truly useful for you."
Google says the latest versions of Gemini are faster and cheaper to run.
The company discussed a prototype dubbed Project Astra.
It can talk to users about anything captured on their smartphone camera.
In a demo video shown during the event a user deployed it to identify a speaker and locate glasses they had left in another part of the room.
Also on stage was Demis Hassabis - the boss of Alphabet's AI unit, Google DeepMind.
He had a new video project to show off:
"Today, I'm excited to announce our newest, most capable generative video model called Veo. Veo creates high-quality, 1080p videos from text, image and video prompts. It can capture the details of your instructions in different visual and cinematic styles."
It all came just a day after a presentation by OpenAI - the maker of ChatGPT.
Researchers demonstrated the bot's new verbal conversational ability, which boss Sam Altman said was like something "from the movies".
With Alphabet's event coming so soon after, and covering similar ground, analysts say it's all evidence of the pace and ferocity of competition over AI.
