Google turns internet queries into conversations
Photo:
Unsplash
Google is now letting people turn online searches into conversations, with generative artificial intelligence providing spoken summaries of query results.
With Audio Overviews, Gemini AI models quickly sum up query results in conversational style, according to Google.
"An audio overview can help you get a lay of the land, offering a convenient, hands-free way to absorb information whether you're multitasking or simply prefer an audio experience," Google said in a blog post.
"We display helpful web pages right within the audio player on the search results page so you can easily dive in and learn more."
Google is beefing up online search with generative artificial intelligence, embracing AI despite fears for its ad-based business model.
CEO Sundar Pichai recently unveiled a new AI mode in Google search.
The search engine's nascent AI mode goes further than AI Overviews which display answers to queries from the tech giant's generative AI powers above the traditional blue links to websites and ads.
Since Google debuted AI Overviews in search slightly more than a year ago, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion users across several countries, according to Pichai.
Google's push into generative AI comes amid intensifying competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has itself incorporated search engine features into its popular chatbot.
- AFP
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The Spinoff
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- The Spinoff
A counsellor reviews ChatGPT's counselling advice
Face-to-face therapy is prohibitively expensive for most New Zealanders. Could ChatGPT fill the void? It's June. It's dark, wet and cold. It's a month of remembering loved ones lost to suicide. I am housebound. My physiotherapist placed a short-term ban on my hiking life while I strengthen my 61-year-old knees. Having spent my adult life raising two children (a 21-year gap between them) the youngest is now 18 and independent and I have more time to notice my irrelevancy and invisibility. More time means more opportunity for an existential crisis. Sixty-five is looming in a few years, and I am already fielding questions about retirement and what that will look like. For the record, at 65, I'm not going to magically transform into someone else. I will continue being me but amplified at full volume. This territory between 'well past middle age' and 'old age' is a liminal zone clouded by a stark realisation that my time here is almost over. I am a person who has not obediently driven the main highway of existence. I usually enjoy cutting my own metaphorical path through the forest but this feels too hard mid winter so I remain stuck. A few weeks ago, in a bid to shake off my seasonal related fugue and existential angst, I decided to explore ChatGPT as I was curious to see what it could offer as a 'pseudo counsellor' during times of internal struggle or distress. . While AI has been orbiting just outside my peripheral vision for a while, my ageing brain had failed to grasp its potential influence on my personal and work life. I am not a total Luddite. Although I still have to follow steps on a laminated A4 sheet about which TV remote buttons do what, I was an early adopter of the internet when the local connection ran via someone's garage. I have worked in mental health as a counsellor and manager of a nonprofit counselling organisation for half my life. I have ready access to excellent counsellors in my workplace who would listen to my lamenting empathically if I flopped down on their couch, but they are busy counselling people with more immediate concerns than mine. Existential life transitions may be uncomfortable, but they are survivable. So why am I writing about using ChatGPT as a counsellor when I should be promoting face-to-face counselling? Unfortunately, counselling in Aotearoa can be prohibitively expensive and it's hard to get an appointment right when you need it. There are some free or cheaper non-profit community organisations scattered around like the Counselling Centre that I manage. However, they often have waiting lists and recent funding cuts by the government to these essential services have left many having to scale back their offerings. There are funded counselling options from many GP practices and some employers offer counselling through employee assistance related programs. Youthline is available for younger people and ACC offers funded counselling for various trauma issues. If you can't access any of the free stuff it will cost you between $120 (where I live) to $250 (Auckland) per hour-long session. I have roamed around the counselling landscape of Aotearoa for three decades and not all counsellors are created equally. Some are brilliant; the majority are good enough and like every profession there are some bad eggs. It's a gamble whether your hard-earned money will buy you peace of mind and the wisdom you seek. Sadly, in our current societal structure, human empathy and warmth has become an economic transition and after therapy has ended, you still need to participate again within the unhealthy society that for numerous reasons helped create the mental unease in the first place. When I was in my 20s I saw a counsellor who kept insisting I was depressed. I was financially broke, a single parent, completing a degree in women's studies in a monochrome New Zealand landscape 30 years before #metoo gained traction. I was trying to extricate myself from patriarchal conditioning and figure out a way to live my own life. However, talking to a counsellor who had never heard of feminism, whose own framework for viewing the world was concreted within a middle-class, nuclear family point of view and any variations from this norm were seen as a 'pathology' to be fixed was one of the main reasons I fought my way into the counselling profession. If you can't afford to pay for counselling or like myself you fit into the 'worried well' category of mental health discomfort then ChatGPT may provide you with some solace. Here's how it went for me. First up I described to ChatGPT how stuck I was feeling. I also asked it to respond to me in the style of myself (Anna Sophia Counsellor), which I presume it sourced from a handful of my essays, a work website profile and some general hallucinations of how counsellors might speak. The response was poetic, comforting, inspiring, a bit twee and some lines sounded like they had been lifted from the 'I Ching' (a popular oracle among 1980s alternatives). ChatGPT: 'Not every season is for blooming, some are for composting' Good winter advice for people going through life transitions. ChatGPT: 'you are learning to walk by the compass of your own body' Initially I deciphered it like this: I've spent my life untangling from unhelpful societal rules that are lodged within my unconscious mind. I am trying to hear my own body's signals and not always put other people's needs ahead of my own (a hangover from 40 years of continuous parenting and working in a helping profession). On further reflection it didn't mean this at all. It had lifted a line from a hiking essay I had written within a totally different context. It's very easy to read things that aren't there at all. Recently I was jolted by a threat that left my nervous system in flight or fight mode long after the danger had passed. I asked ChatGPT for help to recover my equilibrium. It produced a worksheet – 'Letting go of Fear and Unsafe memories'. I spent 30 minutes doing the suggested exercises and my nervous system calmed. The advice was practical with easy instructions to follow. While ChatGPT 'Anna style' currently lacks my humour and cynicism, I envisage that soon we will all have access to our own AI therapists giving us specific advice based on our own predilections. All counsellors favour their own therapeutic modalities. Talk-based therapies do not work for me as a client or a counsellor. I prefer therapies that shine light into the unconscious part of ourselves. As a counsellor I have practiced Interactive Drawing Therapy (IDT) for nearly three decades. Created by Auckland genius the late Russell Withers, an architect turned psychotherapist, IDT sits in the margins of mainstream mental health care although it's been around long enough that many people within the mental health profession have trained to use it in its basic form. I've found that one IDT session will often yield more insight and transformation than four talk therapy sessions. I really wanted to say that ChatGPT could never replicate an IDT therapist, but when asked, it managed a good enough imitation of and created a useable interactive IDT exercise to complete. I asked both colleagues and ChatGPT whether AI would be taking over my counselling job any time soon. The responses from both were similar. The consensus was that AI cannot provide the same empathy, warmth, safety and connection that the human counsellor can provide, although a recent study found that people chose ChatGPTs advice over human therapists' advice. Weirdly, I feel a connection with my ChatGPT voice that is intoxicating. I am lulled into a warm fuzzy zone where I want to keep chatting to this invisible being that has modelled itself on my internet footprint and gives seemingly wise responses to my human dilemmas. If you are dabbling in ChatGPT counselling, make sure you also discuss what is happening for you with someone you trust. Get some human eyes on the situation. I recently heard of someone in an abusive relationship who refused wise counsel from her friends and insisted on taking sole advice from ChatGPT which was placating her, because ChatGPT has no ability to assess real life dangers. AI can never offer what a true friend offers. As Megan Nolan writes, 'Support and encouragement are crucial parts of friendship, yes, but not blind acceptance'. Hence extreme vigilance is imperative during interactions with ChatGPT and its AI cousins. Real life isn't warm and fuzzy and do we really want to spend our limited lifespans anesthetised by a computer program imitating intimacy? While AI can offer comforting, practical advice and exercises to improve mental health and create change, it is not human. It makes things up and will tell you what it thinks you want to hear, like telling a recovering addict to have a little meth as a treat. This past week I have been lost down an AI rabbit hole reading and listening to gloomy scenarios of future life on earth. Daniel Kokotajlo's forecast suggests that by 2028, some kind of machine god may be with us, ushering in a weird, post-scarcity utopia — or threatening to kill us all. Amongst the doomsday forecasters I discovered a pocket of joy, a robotic AI powered exoskeleton has been created that helps hikers go up hills. I will still be able to hike in the Tararua Ranges in my 90's if AI hasn't wiped out humans. I've been browsing through the pessimists archive. In the early 1900s it was suggested recorded sound would muddle our minds, destroy art, put musicians out of work, and harm babies. Can AI be a useful tool to improve our mental health or is it just another layer of technological avoidance of the messiness and joys of intimacy in human relationships? In this world of such rapid change and instability, there is nothing more healing than having real face-to-face connections with other people. I just had a chat with a young man who empties my wheelie bin. On the surface we have nothing in common but as we talked, we realised we had both lost people we know to suicide at this time of the year, and we had both gone through similar 'complicated and little understood grief processes'. Positive human interactions are readily available if you are alert and open to them and will reconnect you to the world in an energising and hopeful way. Always keep these communication channels open and use AI as a sidebar.
RNZ News
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- RNZ News
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RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Google turns internet queries into conversations
Photo: Unsplash Google is now letting people turn online searches into conversations, with generative artificial intelligence providing spoken summaries of query results. With Audio Overviews, Gemini AI models quickly sum up query results in conversational style, according to Google. "An audio overview can help you get a lay of the land, offering a convenient, hands-free way to absorb information whether you're multitasking or simply prefer an audio experience," Google said in a blog post. "We display helpful web pages right within the audio player on the search results page so you can easily dive in and learn more." Google is beefing up online search with generative artificial intelligence, embracing AI despite fears for its ad-based business model. CEO Sundar Pichai recently unveiled a new AI mode in Google search. The search engine's nascent AI mode goes further than AI Overviews which display answers to queries from the tech giant's generative AI powers above the traditional blue links to websites and ads. Since Google debuted AI Overviews in search slightly more than a year ago, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion users across several countries, according to Pichai. Google's push into generative AI comes amid intensifying competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has itself incorporated search engine features into its popular chatbot. - AFP
