That was how long Google was giving Sissie Hsiao. A hundred days to build a ChatGPT rival. By the time Hsiao took on the project in December 2022, she had spent more than 16 years at the company. She led thousands of employees. Hsiao had seen her share of corporate crises--but nothing like the code red that had been brewing in the days since OpenAI, a small research lab, released its public experiment in artificial intelligence.

Google launched a barrage of new hardware this week, from the Pixel 9 smartphones to new wireless earbuds. Underpinning all the shiny gadgetry is Google's Gemini artificially intelligent assistant. The chatbot launched earlier this year and is now the default assistant on the Pixel 9 series and is already available on millions of Android phones worldwide. But there's a new way to talk to this chatbot that's now rolling out: Gemini Live. This is Google's response to OpenAI's GPT-4o, a way to talk to the assistant naturally, much like a normal voice conversation between two humans (or at least that's the goal).

ChatGPT, released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI just 14 months ago, changed people's expectations of what computers could do. Google, which has been racing to catch up ever since, unveiled its Gemini family of models in December. They are multimodal large language models that can interact with you via voice, image, and text. Google claimed that its own benchmarking showed Gemini outperforming GPT-4 on a range of standard tests. But the margins were slim. By baking Gemini into its ubiquitous tools, Google is hoping to make up lost ground and even overtake its rival.

When OpenAI's ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry's former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a chatbot-style version of search. Now Google is consolidating many of its generative AI products under the banner of its latest AI model Gemini--and taking direct aim at OpenAI's subscription service ChatGPT Plus. Google announced today that Bard, its experimental chatbot hurriedly launched last March, is now called Gemini--taking the same name of the text, voice, and image capable AI model that started powering the Bard chatbot back in December. Gemini is also getting more prominent positioning among Google's services.

During its Made by Google event on Wednesday, the company announced that it's integrating its Bard AI chatbot into Google Assistant. The company describes the feature as combining Bard's "generative reasoning" with Assistant's "personalized help" to provide more contextually aware responses for mobile users. It will be available within the next few months. The feature was first rumored this summer. "While Assistant is great at handling quick tasks, like setting timers, giving weather updates, and making quick calls, there is so much more that we've always envisioned a deeply capable personal Assistant should be able to do," said Google VP of Assistant / Bard Sissie Hsiao during the keynote.

Google went big when it launched its generative AI fight-back against OpenAI's ChatGPT in May. The company added AI text-generation to its signature search engine, showed off an AI-customized version of the Android operating system, and offered up its own chatbot, Bard. But one Google product didn't get a generative AI infusion: Google Assistant, the company's answer to Siri and Alexa. Today, at its Pixel hardware event in New York, Google Assistant at last got its upgrade for the ChatGPT era. Sissie Hsiao, Google's vice president and general manager for Google Assistant, revealed a new version of the AI helper that is a mashup of Google Assistant and Bard.

Google is reshuffling the reporting structure of its virtual assistant unit -- called Assistant -- to focus more on Bard, the company's new artificial intelligence chat technology. In a memo to employees on Wednesday, titled "Changes to Assistant and Bard teams," Sissie Hsiao, vice president and lead of Google Assistant's business unit, announced changes to the organization that show the unit heavily prioritizing Bard. Jianchang "JC" Mao, who reported directly to Hsiao, will be leaving the company for personal reasons, according to the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. Mao held the position of vice president of engineering for Google Assistant and "helped shape the Assistant we have today," Hsiao wrote. Taking Mao's place will be 16-year Google veteran Peeyush Ranjan, who most recently held the title of vice president in Google's commerce organization, overseeing payments.

You can set limits and block specific content on your child's smartphone, tablet, or computer, but the smart speakers and smart displays in your home are something of a loophole. If your kids are anything like mine, you've probably caught them asking weird questions to voice assistants or watching a video when it's homework time. Well, there's good news: Google is closing this loophole with a set of parental controls for Google Assistant. These new controls enable you to set a Downtime that works across shared family devices and will restrict content and functionality based on who is asking. You can restrict your kids to YouTube Kids for video and Spotify Kids for music, for example.

In the fast-paced field of making the world's tech devices, Pegatron Corp. initially harnessed AI to gain an edge. Now, it's on the cusp of creating digital twins to further streamline its efficiency. Whether or not they're familiar with the name, most people have probably used smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi routers or other products that Taiwan-based Pegatron makes in nearly a dozen factories across seven countries. Last year, it made more than 10 million notebook computers. Andrew Hsiao, associate vice president of Pegatron's software R&D division, is leading the company's move into machine learning and the 3D internet known as the metaverse.

Google Assistant is already pretty handy, filling in your payment info on take out orders, helping get the kids to school on time, controlling your stereo systems' volume and your home's smart light schedules. At its I/O 2022 keynote today, company executives showed off some of the new features arriving soon for the AI. The first of these is "Look and Talk." Instead of having to repeatedly start your requests to Assistant with "Hey Google," this new feature relies on computer vision and voice matching to constantly pay attention to the user. As Sissie Hsiao, Google's VP of Assistant, explained on stage, all the user has to do is look at their Nest Hub Max and state their request.