To build AI that children can intuitively understand and benefit from, designers need a design grammar that serves their developmental needs. This paper bridges artificial intelligence design for children - an emerging field still defining its best practices - and animation, a well established field with decades of experience in engaging children through accessible storytelling. Pairing Piagetian developmental theory with design pattern extraction from 52 works of animation, the paper presents a six scaffold framework that integrates design insights transferable to child centred AI design: (1) signals for visual animacy and clarity, (2) sound for musical and auditory scaffolding, (3) synchrony in audiovisual cues, (4) sidekick style personas, (5) storyplay that supports symbolic play and imaginative exploration, and (6) structure in the form of predictable narratives. These strategies, long refined in animation, function as multimodal scaffolds for attention, understanding, and attunement, supporting learning and comfort. This structured design grammar is transferable to AI design. By reframing cinematic storytelling and child development theory as design logic for AI, the paper offers heuristics for AI that aligns with the cognitive stages and emotional needs of young users. The work contributes to design theory by showing how sensory, affective, and narrative techniques can inform developmentally attuned AI design. Future directions include empirical testing, cultural adaptation, and participatory co design.

Google is deepening its push into generative artificial intelligence, introducing features Tuesday that will let users create text in Gmail and Docs using the company's AI technology. The company is testing the AI products and making them accessible for a limited number of users of Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google's productivity tools. "Whether you're a busy HR professional who needs to create customized job descriptions, or a parent drafting the invitation for your child's pirate-themed birthday party, Workspace saves you the time and effort of writing that first version," Johanna Voolich Wright, vice president of product for Google Workspace, wrote in a blog post. "Simply type a topic you'd like to write about, and a draft will instantly be generated for you." Generative AI has been the hottest topic in tech this year after San Francisco startup OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT chatbot in November and watched it quickly go viral.

Google is deepening its push into generative artificial intelligence, introducing features Tuesday that will let users create text in Gmail and Docs using the company's AI technology. The company is testing the AI products and making them accessible for a limited number of users of Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google's productivity tools. "Whether you're a busy HR professional who needs to create customized job descriptions, or a parent drafting the invitation for your child's pirate-themed birthday party, Workspace saves you the time and effort of writing that first version," Johanna Voolich Wright, vice president of product for Google Workspace, wrote in a blog post. "Simply type a topic you'd like to write about, and a draft will instantly be generated for you." Generative AI has been the hottest topic in tech this year after San Francisco startup OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT chatbot in November and watched it quickly go viral.

Google on Tuesday began letting some developers and businesses access the kind of artificial intelligence that has captured attention since the launch of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT last year. The tech giant's cloud computing arm will provide testers with ways to "infuse generative AI" into apps or put them to work on Google's own platform. "With this, Google Cloud is poised to enable a whole new generation of builders, innovators, developers and doers to harness the power of AI in novel ways," said Ritu Jyoti, vice president of an AI group at market research firm IDC. Developers and businesses will be able to try new application programming interfaces (APIs) and products that make it "easy, safe and scalable" to build AI models using Google's cloud service, Google's Thomas Kurian said in a blog post. Among the functions Google hopes to make more broadly accessible is a generative AI that will allow software to use prompts to sum up information or write in a conversational style.

Google and Microsoft are locked in a head-to-head competition to bring as much generative AI to their productivity services as possible. Only days ahead of Microsoft's "Future of Work" event, Google today announced a sweeping update to Workspace that will bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of its productivity suite, in addition to new developer solutions that will make Google's foundation models, including its 540 billion-parameter PaLM large language model for multiturn chats, available to developers through an API and new low-code tools. The caveats worth mentioning up front: For the time being, these new features will only be available for what Google calls "Trusted Testers." It's unclear when they will roll out to a wider audience. There's also no pricing information available yet, though it sounds like at least a subset of these features will be available to consumers -- including those on Google One plans. Basically, this is akin to Google's LaMDA announcements a few weeks ago: they sound great, but it'll be a while before you can try any of this in practice.

The launch of ChatGPT a few months ago kicked off an artificial intelligence arms race among big tech companies. Microsoft has invested billions into Open A.I., the company that created ChatGPT, and plans to incorporate the technology into its Bing search engine. And the chatbot's debut forced Google, which has been researching A.I. for years, to jump into the game and rush to market with its own A.I. product, Bard. After decades of search dominance, the rapid developments have left Google playing defense. The company asked its A.I. teams last month to "prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT."

In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested a Pentagon contract dubbed Project Maven that used the company's artificial intelligence technology to analyze drone surveillance footage. Google said it wouldn't renew the contract and announced guiding principles for future AI projects that forbid work on weapons and surveillance projects "violating internationally accepted norms." At the same time, Google made clear it would still seek defense contracts. "While we are not developing AI for use in weapons," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas." In the three years since, Google has stayed true to his word.

Google and Ford have announced a first-of-its-kind partnership "that promises to transform both Ford and the auto industry," Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, told reporters during a virtual press conference on Monday. "We both believe that the relationship between Google and Ford will establish an innovation powerhouse," David McClelland, Ford vice president strategy and partnerships, added. "It will accelerate the modernization of our business and Ford, and most importantly, it will let us exceed our customers expectations." The under the terms of the six-year partnership, Ford has named Google as its preferred cloud provider and, beginning in 2023, millions of Ford and Lincoln vehicles will operate using Android Auto (just as we saw in the Polestar 2) with Google apps, such as Assistant and Maps, embedded into the infotainment system. But don't worry iPhone owners, Ford will continue to support Apple CarPlay and Amazon Alexa functionality moving forward.

Google Cloud's bet on an open platform is starting to materialize with Anthos and BigQuery Omni. Three years ago, I started (and sadly never finished) a series called Platform Wars (Part I, Part II), evaluating the tech giants and their strategies in the age of artificial intelligence. In my piece on Google, I explained Google's shift to an AI-first company, and why Kubernetes was a crucial part of Google's strategy to compete in the enterprise cloud market. Fast forward two years, Google Cloud reported meaningful growth, but still stood a distant third to AWS and Azure. Thomas Kurian, a former Oracle exec, was brought in to replace Diane Greene, carrying with him a vision for a multi-cloud strategy.

Google today announced that it has signed up Verizon as the newest customer of its Google Cloud Contact Center AI service, which aims to bring natural language recognition to the often inscrutable phone menus that many companies still use today (disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of the Verizon Media Group). For Google, that's a major win, but it's also a chance for the Google Cloud team to highlight some of the work it has done in this area. It's also worth noting that the Contact Center AI product is a good example of Google Cloud's strategy of packaging up many of its disparate technologies into products that solve specific problems. "A big part of our approach is that machine learning has enormous power but it's hard for people," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told me in an interview ahead of today's announcement. "Instead of telling people, 'well, here's our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text -- and why don't you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?' Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it's much easier for them when we do that and […] that it's a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers."