Google has, seemingly accidentally, leaked the next step in its AI takeover with Jarvis, a service spotted at the Chrome extension store.
Google Jarvis was removed before too many people could download it, but not before tech publication The Information managed to note down what it appears to offer.
When released, Google Jarvis could potentially level-up the usefulness of AI, as it will perform online tasks for you. This could even include booking a holiday or buying groceries - depending on how much faith you’re willing to put in the service.
Jarvis’s potential tasks include “gathering research, purchasing a product, or booking a flight”, according to The Information.
This is an important (if predictable) development of Google’s Gemini AI, the overarching term currently used for the tech giant’s large array of AI features.
Jarvis is described as “a helpful companion that surfs the web for you”, and is (or at least was) set to be officially announced in December, according to The Verge.
It also has conceptual roots in Google products that were around long before ChatGPT was released.
Remember Duplex? Google showed off the futuristic feature at the I/O conference way back in 2018.
It was a voice assistant that could call up restaurants to make reservations, using natural speech synthesis. Duplex was released, although not widely used, and its web version was in operation until 2022.
“By the end of this year, we’ll turn down Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements to the Duplex voice technology that helps people most every day,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch in 2022.
This next exploration of artificial intelligence is part of a category dubbed the AI agent, a virtual digital entity you can complete tasks set by a user.
Microsoft just announced its own take on this tech in a slightly technical paper on the Microsoft AI Frontiers blog, called Magentic-One.
This post explains how the system uses a middle-manager AI that co-ordinates a series of bot instances that might, for example, order a sandwich or find mentions of something in a research paper.
The idea is these AI agents can “solve a broad variety of open-ended problems” to go beyond the experience of standard large-language model chatbots, which many of us are already familiar with.
But, as we saw the Duplex, these AI assistants may not alway take off when available to the wider public.
