Next: The AI software revolution – Yahoo Finance
The artificial intelligence revolution is here, and it’s increasingly coming to the tech you use every day. From smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktops, AI will dramatically expand your most important devices’ capabilities, adding everything from generative AI that improves and edits your photos to AI assistants that can summarize your information across several apps.
And Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) are all jumping onboard the train to ensure they stay ahead of the curve. Of the three, Google is making the biggest push with its latest smartphones, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, by adding a variety of AI features to the phones’ camera apps. And in the future, the company will bring its Bard AI chatbot’s capabilities to its Google Assistant for both Android and iOS.
With the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, you’ll be able to edit images via Google’s new AI-powered Magic Editor.
Say you have a picture of your son shooting a basketball toward a hoop, but you want to make it look like he’s a hoops star. Magic Editor will let you grab his body in the photo and drag it up to the basket, making it look like he’s dunking the ball. The feature will then automatically fill in the background where your future offensive player of the year once stood to make it look like he was never there. You can even grab his shadow and move it underneath him as he’s dunking to make the photo look more realistic.
Google’s phones also get a feature called Best Take, an AI option meant to ensure everyone in a group photo looks their best. It lets you take a number of photos of a group, then gives you the option to choose the best headshot of each person from those photos and pull them all into one image. So if someone was blinking in one shot and smiling in another, you can switch out their blinking headshot for the one in which they were smiling.
Audio Magic Eraser lets you remove extraneous background audio from your videos. So if you’re, say, recording a street musician and a firetruck goes by, you can use Audio Magic Eraser to take out the sound of the truck’s sirens while leaving in the sound of the musician playing.
The company’s Google Assistant is also getting more AI know-how. It will now answer your calls for you and let you reply to callers using context-sensitive text responses that it will then read to the caller in an uncannily human-like voice. If, for instance, you get a call from your Amazon driver saying he’s trying to drop off a package, the assistant will automatically generate responses such as “Leave it at the front door.” Tap the best answer, and the assistant will speak it to the delivery driver.
And in the coming months, Google says the assistant will get many of the capabilities of its Bard chatbot, meaning you’ll be able to use it to search your emails using natural voice requests, among other improvements.
Microsoft is adding its own AI functionality to its Windows 11 operating system via its Copilot platform. Copilot lives on your laptop or desktop and provides you with a host of new options for organizing data and interacting with your computer. If, for instance, you copy a large swath of text from an email, Copilot will automatically pop up on the right side of your desktop.
You can then use the app to summarize your email and search for information in it. For example, if you get a message about different interesting locations to visit in a city, you can copy it into Copilot and then ask it how far the nearest locale is, rather than having to copy and paste it into Google Maps.
Need to connect a Bluetooth mouse to your PC? You can ask Copilot how to show you how, and it will pull up the appropriate menu.
In the future, Microsoft says Copilot will eventually work with your phone, allowing you to grab information from texts, such as your flight time, and fire off responses from your PC.
Currently, Microsoft’s Copilot is broken up between apps, so there’s a version for the Windows 11 desktop, another for Outlook, and yet another for the Edge web browser. But in the future the company says it will merge these instances of the platform so that you have one single version of Copilot across all of your apps.
Apple is also implementing more AI into its devices, though it’s doing so with a more subtle touch than Google or Microsoft. Rather than calling out the technology itself, Apple, as is its way, is talking up the features the technology powers.
There’s the company’s new Double Tap feature for the new Apple Watch that uses machine learning algorithms to determine when you move your wrist and pinch your fingers to read and reply to texts or pause and unpause music. Predictive text is far more accurate across the board, and Live Voicemail transcribes voicemails as people leave them so you can see if the person calling has something pressing to tell you.
My favorite feature though? Auto Portrait mode. Rather than having to turn on Portrait mode, the option is turned on automatically whenever you point your camera at a person, cat, or dog. Heck, I’ve gotten it to work on a pigeon.
Taken together, the moves are a clear sign that AI is becoming less of a concept and more of a concrete product you’ll use every day.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
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