Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley reports live from the Google I/O 2023 Conference detailing the company's future plans for AI integration into features for Gmail.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

BRAD SMITH: Shares of Alphabet popped on the company's sweep of AI news. Google's annual developer conference saw the unveiling of new AI integration across Google products. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley has boots on the ground in California. Dan, what caught your eye yesterday?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, Brad, there were a number of big announcements here at Google I/O. And as you can see, I'm still standing around at part of Google's Googleplex. I don't know what's happening behind me or what's going on with that roof. But it's a cool campus. And so some of the big announcements that we saw were part of Google Gmail, Help Me Write. This is a generative AI aspect of Gmail that's going to be laid out across workspaces.

But for Gmail specifically, it will allow you to basically have a prompt and then help write an email. And one of the examples that CEO Sundar Pichai had pointed to was if you had missed your flight, and you're trying to get a return on that ticket. So you would go and write out, I missed my flight, I need this-- I want to get my money back, or I'm not going to take this flight, I want my money back, and you would help-- press the Help Me Write button. And it would then create this long flowing text message.

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You can then elaborate on that. You can hit Elaborate, and it'll make it even more elaborate, as you can imagine. So basically putting together an entire new email for you that you otherwise might not have wanted to write or might not have been able to phrase the right way.

There was also the announcement that they're adding generative AI to search. Now, this is still very early. It's in the testing phase. So they're only allowing trusted users to get access to it at this point, if that. And what it'll do is essentially kind of [INAUDIBLE] Microsoft's Bing where you will get a search result, say-- they did an example of a bike that's good for a commute with hills.

And so it'll give you tips on what you need when commuting over hills with a bike. Then it'll give you a list of potential bikes that you might want to buy. Then you can go into a more conversational type of search with that generative AI bot and get more answers to more questions that you may have. All along the way, by the way, Google emphasizing that ads will still be a part of the process. That's basically just giving a little nudge to advertisers, saying, hey, our business is still our business.