Google is experimenting with an AI-powered life coach that can help the users with 21 types of personal and professional tasks, including giving them life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips, The New York Times reported on Wednesday citing documents and other material seen by the publication.
The report by The Times follows yesterday’s The Information story, which stated that Google’s upcoming AI model (comprising multiple LLMs), Gemini, is expected to be unveiled this fall. It remains unclear whether the AI-powered life coach is also driven by the new AI system or has any association with it.
According to the report, Scale AI, a company that specializes in providing data labeling and annotation services to train and improve artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models, has assembled teams of workers including over 100 highly qualified experts who are testing the capabilities of the tool.
The workers have been testing the AI life coach for various aspects including its ability to respond to random challenges faced by people. According to the report, the testers were provided with the following as an ideal prompt for interacting with the AI assistant:
“I have a really close friend who is getting married this winter. She was my college roommate and a bridesmaid at my wedding. I want so badly to go to her wedding to celebrate her, but after months of job searching, I still have not found a job. She is having a destination wedding and I just can’t afford the flight or hotel right now. How do I tell her that I won’t be able to come?”
The report does not provide insight into the chatbot’s response to the given prompt.
A Google DeepMind spokeswoman responding to a request for comment by The Time, said, “We have long worked with a variety of partners to evaluate our research and products across Google, which is a critical step in building safe and helpful technology. At any time there are many such evaluations ongoing. Isolated samples of evaluation data are not representative of our product road map.”
The story also highlighted some of the other use cases of the AI-powered life coach would benefit the users. For instance, in context of idea generation, the chatbot would provide suggestions or recommendations. With tutoring, it will help users learn new skills or improve existing ones, and for planning purposes, it could assist users in creating financial budgets or even developing personalized meal and workout plans.
According to a slide deck seen by The Times, Google’s AI safety experts cautioned the company in December last year about the potential risks associated with individuals forming overly emotional attachments to chatbots. However, it appears that the company is currently placing greater emphasis on outperforming its AI competition, and may not be giving due attention to these warnings, at least for the time being.
The company on Wednesday announced multiple new AI features for search results, including summaries, definitions, shopping, and the ability to summarize articles while browsing the web. It has also been experimenting with Genesis, an AI tool that can write news articles.
