In Love With Your Best Friend? Google's AI Life Coach Under Development Might Just Have The Answers

Google is reportedly creating an AI-enhanced life coach to offer solutions for users’ personal challenges.

With artificial intelligence at the center of tech developments, companies in Silicon Valley are racing to develop the tools that will become ubiquitous in the next AI-powered stage of computing.

The life coach tool, which has not been officially released or announced by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL, came to light after The New York Times gained access to documents and other materials detailing its development.

In late July, it became known that Google is working on upgrading its Assistant — which is comparable to Apple's AAPL Siri — to include generative AI. Apple and Amazon AMZN are also working on upgrading their assistants with large language models to work as possible life companions.

As a first step in that direction, Google announced in June an upcoming project called Tailwind, which would provide users with their own, personalized AI tool.

The new development is reportedly coming from Google DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research unit, which is a result of the April merger of subsidiary DeepMind with Google's internal Ai research arm, called Brain.

The outlet reported that Google DeepMind is developing "at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips."

People familiar with the matter who anonymously spoke to the outlet said that Scale AI, a third-party contractor hired by Google, has put together a team of experts in different fields to train the model and test its responses. At least 100 of the newly hired workforce are PhD-level experts.

The tool is being developed to answer intimate questions, such as advising on conversations with a friend whose overseas wedding one can’t attend due to financial constraints. The model would also include a tutoring function that can help users learn new skills, improve existing ones, help develop a financial budget, improve one's running scores or develop a meal plan.

If the development gets a release date, it could give Google an edge over Microsoft MSFT, which became the unlikely leader in the AI-chat sphere by being an early adopter of the technology on its search engine Bing. Microsoft is facing a PR crisis as it became known that the company is storing all chats from non-paying customers.

Bard, which is Google's available AI assistant, is currently barred by Google from providing financial or medical advice in an effort to steer away from legal trouble. 

Also read: Is Google Bard Better Than ChatGPT? 8 Capabilities Exclusive To OpenAI’s Chatbot Rival

Bard will also avoid providing legal advice, instead directing the user to resources where answers can be found. When users ask Bard legal questions, it will provide a disclaimer: "I am not a lawyer, and I cannot provide legal advice. If you need specific legal advice, you should consult with a qualified lawyer."

However, Bard does provide answers to personal questions such as what to do if one's in love with their best friend, how to become better at work or what's a good meal plan. The tool, however, only provides answers to specific questions and does not track their development.

In spite of the hype, the new life coach might never get a release date. A spokesperson for Google DeepMind told The NY Times that "isolated samples of evaluation data are not representative of our product road map."

The person referred to the data being examined by Scale AI and said that Google has "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."

A former Google officer said last week that he expects AI to become one billion times smarter than humans by 2045.

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Picture made with Midjourney AI.