Google Introduces AI-Enhanced Pixel Devices with Price Increase

Google introduced a new range of Pixel smartphones on Wednesday, which will incorporate advanced artificial intelligence features. These tools will enable the devices to generate captions for photos and also allow the technology to modify them.

The addition of artificial intelligence, or artificial intelligence, to Google’s products marks another step in the company’s efforts to bring more technology into the mainstream — a push they announced at their annual developer conference five months ago.

“We’re focused on making AI more useful for everyone in a bold and responsible way,” Rick Osterloh, Google’s vice president of devices and services, said at an event in New York on Wednesday. Osterloh described the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones as a conduit for “AI in your hand.”

The company’s next moves include allowing its 7-year-old Google Assistant to use the company’s newly hatched AI chatbot, Bard, to complete tasks. The expanded access to Bard comes just two weeks after Google began integrating the AI chatbot with the company’s other popular services, including Gmail, Maps and YouTube.

One of the new tricks the Bard-powered assistant is supposed to be able to do is scan a photo taken with a phone running Google’s Android software and create a succinct caption suitable for social media. As Google has done with most of its AI methods, Bard-powered Google Assistant will initially only be available to a test audience before gradually being offered as an option to more owners of the latest Pixels.

As has become common in the industry, most of the rest of the technology in the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which were introduced during the event in New York, is similar to what was already available in last year’s models.

One of the main selling points of the new phones is the improved cameras, including more AI-powered editing tools, which are mostly available on the Pixel 8 Pro. Artificial intelligence features are able to refine photos, zoom in on certain parts of photos, replace faces taken from other photos in group photos, and remove objects and people from photos completely.

Google is confident that the new AI twists added to this year’s lineup will be enough to justify the price hike — with both the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro starting at $100 more than last year’s comparable models.

This leads to the Pixel 8 selling for $700 and the Pixel 8 Pro for $1,000 when they hit stores next week. Apple also raised the starting price of its top-of-the-line iPhones by $100 when its latest models were released last month, signaling that inflationary pressures are starting to drive up the cost of devices that have become an integral part of modern life.

The Pixel 8 Pro will also be able to take people’s temperatures, an addition that could be a drawing card in the post-pandemic era as different strains of COVID continue to evolve. But Google is still trying to get regulatory approval to roll out the feature in the US. In the 2020 phone, the Honor Play 4 Pro, which made my Huawei, could also screen the fever, so Google is not breaking new ground.

Despite generally positive reviews, Pixel phones have barely made a dent in a market dominated by Samsung and Apple since Google started making the devices seven years ago. But they’ve gained a bit more traction in recent years, with the Pixel now accounting for about 4% of the high-end smartphone market, down from less than 1% three years ago, according to research firm International Data Corp.

Google can afford to make a phone that doesn’t generate huge sales because it brings in more than $200 billion a year from a digital ad network anchored to its dominant search engine. Much of the advertising revenue comes from the billions of dollars Google pays each year to lock its search engine into the main gateway to the Internet on the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy lineup.

The deals that have given Google’s search engine a lucrative position in phones and computers are at the center of an ongoing antitrust trial in Washington, where the US Justice Department is trying to prove its claim that Google has abused its power to stifle competition and innovation. .

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