Google and Microsoft are this week revealing how major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will be built into their respective search engines.
The tech giants have invested billions of dollars in the technology, and Microsoft's partnership with ChatGPT creators OpenAI reportedly caused a "code red" panic at Google late last year.
Let's take a look at how the companies are going to integrate conversational AI into their search engines, and how it will change the way we use the internet.
Google announces Bard, as it builds more AI into Search
Google Search already uses machine learning to find results, and today the company announced it is integrating "an experimental conversational AI service" called Bard, which will be released publicly in the coming weeks.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says in a blog post that Bard "seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge" with the "power, intelligence and creativity" of the company's AI technology.
"It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," he writes.
"Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launch pad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills."
Here's a short clip showing how Google suggests Bard will work:
Mr Pichai describes AI as "the most profound technology we are working on today".
"When people think of Google, they often think of turning to us for quick factual answers, like 'how many keys does a piano have?'" he says.
"But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding — like, 'Is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?'
"AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesising insights for questions where there's no one right answer.
"Soon, you'll see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web."
Microsoft's Bing will get ChatGPT tech and pose a threat to Google
Only minutes after Google announced how it planned to integrate Bard, Microsoft announced it would hold a private media event of its own this week.
The company is expected to detail how its $US10 billion ($14.5 billion) investment in OpenAI will allow it to integrate the San Francisco company's popular chatbot ChatGPT within Microsoft's Bing search engine, which remains dominated by Google.
According to unverified alleged leaks, the AI-powered version of Bing shows a new "chat option" in its menu bar, where it can ask and answer questions in a conversational manner while citing its own sources.
Here is an unverified video posted by student and designer Owen Yin, who reported seeing the "new Bing" this week:
Other Bing users noticed the new features were also briefly available to them as well.
While the current public version of ChatGPT is trained on internet data up to 2020, the new version of Bing is expected to be able to draw on up-to-date information.
Toby Walsh, chief scientist of the AI Institute at the University of New South Wales, says Bing's integration of ChatGPT technology poses "a real, potentially existential threat, to a company like Google".
"Both because another competitor can come in, but secondly because it changes the business model of search," he says.
'More seductive' chatbots will change how we use the internet
Experts have been wondering whether internet users will bother clicking on links provided by search engines if those same systems begin to provide instant and conversational answers to our most complex and intimate questions.
It's a shift that means search engines will be trying harder to understand our use of language — while still collecting the data they need to be make money — instead of just trying to find accurate or profitable search results.
"This may well be the beginning of a new type of search where we don't just get sent links to what we want to find, but we may even get the answers to the questions directly," professor Walsh says.
"It's still not going to be perfect, but I'm sure it's going to evolve to be better."
We already share a lot of personal information with search engines, and there are concerns that people might share even more with friendly and conversational AI-based ones.
Professor Walsh says that extra information about us will still be sold to other companies and used for marketing.
"[Tech companies] are not going to get as much money for providing you links … They're going to be looking at that information thinking, 'Who is this information valuable to? Who can we sell it to?'"
An AI chatbot system called Xiaoice, first developed by Microsoft, is already used by hundreds of millions of people on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Weibo and QQ.
"There are lots of lonely people who propose marriage to this chatbot every day, just as people propose marriage to Apple's Siri and other chatbots," professor Walsh says.
"The ones just starting to appear are going to be perhaps more seductive to us. We're going to have long-running conversations, and they're going to remember the context of conversations, and they'll remember things about you.
"It's the beginning, I think, of interesting conversational interfaces with computers, like we have conversations with humans."
Both Google and Microsoft have also flagged that they eventually want their search engines to generate things such as images, audio, and even video for users.
"When you search for an image, it might not just find you an image that exists, it may generate the image," professor Walsh says.
'The ultimate challenge' is powering AI at scale
A key issue with implementing AI in search engines is the amount of infrastructure and processing power needed to run it.
Researchers estimate the scale of the largest AI computations is now doubling every six to 10 months.
It means only large companies with extensive resources have the capacity to allow millions of people to use AI technology simultaneously.
Aside from the likes of Google and Microsoft, Chinese company Baidu is also working on a ChatGPT-style chatbot.
The Reuters news agency says the company plans to launch its Ernie Bot in March, before merging it into its search engine.
"The ultimate challenge is an engineering challenge — how do you scale this so it reaches millions of people and you get a millisecond response?" asks professor Walsh. "That is actually as important, in some sense, as the quality of the result that you're getting.
"OpenAI spends a few cents to answer each of your queries in ChatGPT. Google spends many small fractions of a cent to answer your search queries, and they do it much quicker than ChatGPT.
"Google have got to reduce the cost by orders of magnitude — add the speed — for this to be something that can be integrated into every search that you do."
