Unveiled in December, Bard was touted as a competitor to chatbots like ChatGPT but failed to impress in demos. Google staff even called the launch “botched” and slammed CEO Sundar Pichai.

Now rebranded as Gemini, Google says it represents the company’s “most capable family of models” for natural conversations. Two experiences are being launched: Gemini Advanced and a mobile app.

Gemini Advanced grants access to Ultra 1.0, billed by Google as its “largest and most capable state-of-the-art AI model.” In blind evaluations, third-party raters preferred Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0 over alternatives in complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, and creative collaboration.  

The AI can serve as a tutor by creating personalised lessons and quizzes. Developers are aided for trickier coding problems. Gemini Advanced is designed to spark ideas and strategise ways that creators can grow their audiences.

Google plans to expand Gemini Advanced’s capabilities over time with exclusive features like expanded multimodal interactions, interactive coding, deeper data analysis, and more. The service already supports over 150 countries in English and will add more languages soon.  

Access to Gemini Advanced is granted through a new $19.99 (£18.99) per month Google One AI Premium Plan, including a free two-month trial. Subscribers get the latest Google AI advancements plus 2TB of storage from the existing Premium plan.  

Google claims Gemini Advanced underwent extensive trust and safety checks before its launch, including external reviews, to mitigate issues around unsafe content and bias. More details are available in an updated technical report (PDF).

Lastly, Google launched new mobile apps on Android and iOS to access basic Gemini features on-the-go. Users can ask for help with images, tasks, and more while out-and-about. Over time, the plan is for Gemini to become a true personal AI assistant.

The Gemini mobile apps are now available in the US as a dedicated app on Android and in the Google app on iOS, supporting English conversations initially. Next week, the apps expand to Japan and Korea, followed by more countries and languages thereafter.

(Image Credit: Google)

See also: DeepMind framework offers breakthrough in LLMs’ reasoning

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“From cloud to edge, Paravision’s goal is to help our partners develop and deploy transformative solutions around face recognition and computer vision,” said Joey Pritikin, Chief Product Officer at Paravision.

“With these sweeping updates to our product family, and with what has become possible in terms of accuracy, speed, usability and portability, we see a remarkable opportunity to unite disparate applications with a coherent sense of identity that bridges physical spaces and cyberspace.”

A new Scaled Vector Search (SVS) capability acts as a search engine to provide accurate, rapid, and stable face matching on large databases that may contain tens of millions of identities. Paravision claims the SVS engine supports hundreds of transactions per second with extremely low latencies.

Another scaling solution called Streaming Container 5 enables the processing of video at over 250 frames per second from any number of streams. The solution features advanced face tracking to ensure that identities remain accurate even in busy environments.

With more enterprises than ever looking to the latency-busting and privacy-enhancing benefits of edge computing, Paravision has partnered with Teknique to co-create a series of hardware and software reference designs that enable the rapid development of face recognition and computer vision capabilities at the edge.

Teknique is a leader in the development of hardware based on designs from California-based fabless semiconductor company Ambarella.

Paravision’s Face SDK has been enhanced for smart cameras powered by Ambarella CVflow chipsets. The update enables facial recognition on CVflow-powered cameras to achieve up to 40 frames per second full pipeline performance.

A new Liveness and Anti-spoofing SDK also adds new safeguards for Ambarella-powered facial recognition solutions. The toolkit uses Ambarella’s visible light, near-infrared, and depth-sensing capabilities to determine whether the camera is seeing a live subject or whether it’s being tricked by recorded footage or a dummy image.

On the mobile side, Paravision has released its Face SDK for Android. The SDK includes face detection, landmarks, quality assessment, template creation, and 1-to-1 or 1-to-many matching. Reference applications are included which include UI/UX recommendations and tools.

Last but certainly not least, Paravision has announced the availability of its first person-level computer vision SDK. The new SDK is designed to go “beyond face recognition” to detect the presence and position of individuals and unlock new use cases.

Provided examples of real-world applications for the computer vision SDK include occupancy analysis, the ability to spot tailgating, as well as custom intention or subject attributes.

“With Person Detection, users could determine whether employees are allowed access to a specific area, are wearing a mask or hard hat, or appear to be in distress,” the company explains. “It can also enable useful business insights such as metrics about queue times, customer throughput or to detect traveller bottlenecks.”

With these exhaustive updates, Paravision is securing its place as one of the most exciting companies in the AI space.

Paravision is ranked the US leader across several of NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test evaluations including 1:1 verification, 1:N identification, performance for paperless travel, and performance with face masks.

(Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash)

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Due to US trade restrictions, Huawei is losing access to Google’s services. The new Mate 30 smartphones announced in Munich today will launch with the open-source Android, but it will not feature the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, Google Pay, or the many other services which Western consumers are used to.

Among the features that will be missing from the Mate 30 onwards is Google Assistant. Huawei is quickly working to fill the gaps left without access to Google’s services with its own and is launching the Huawei Assistant as a replacement for Mountain View’s virtual assistant.

Walter Ji, Director of Business, HUAWEI Consumer Business Group Western Europe, said:

“With our focus on user experience, we bring AI into mobile services so we can proactively identify user needs and thus improve their smartphone experience.

Huawei Assistant is a product that intelligently fulfils user needs at the same time as offering partners an opportunity to provide their services to users through a globally-available distribution platform.”

Huawei Assistant will launch with basic functionality compared to Google’s version, but the company is promising to expand it.

By swiping to the right of the homescreen, much like accessing Google Assistant today, users can begin interacting with Huawei Assistant. The service is powered by Huawei Ability Gallery, a service distribution platform.

There are four key features of the Huawei Assistant:

• Newsfeed – Today’s Google Assistant provides some personalised articles when you swipe to it on an Android device. The newsfeed feature is Huawei Assistant’s alternative but users can decide whether to receive custom recommendations or to select from news agencies to fill their feed with “up-to-the-minute” articles.
• Search – Users can search for information on their smartphone using Huawei Assistant. The assistant will surface things such as installed apps, memos, emails, and calendar entries, while also providing an online search feature using the default browser.
• Instant Access – Four shortcuts to a user’s choice of applications can be selected for quick access. In the future, Huawei says this can make use of AI so the shortcuts are intelligently-selected based on what the user may want at that moment.
• SmarterCare – Real-time information will be provided using AI. At launch, this will mean things such as the weather forecast, missed calls, and schedule reminders. Future planned functionality will enable more powerful abilities like booking restaurants, flights, taxis, and hotels.

The new assistant from Huawei will be pre-installed on Mate 30 series devices but it will also be downloadable from the company’s App Gallery.

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