Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.
The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot, a Google director wrote in a document.
Other product ideas are in various stages of development. A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results. Another tool, Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.
Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.
Jim Lecinski, a former Google vice president of sales and service, said the company had been goaded into action and now had to convince users that it was as “powerful, competent and contemporary” as its competitors.
“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,” Mr. Lecinski, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, said in an interview.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, Karen Weise and Tripp Mickle contributed reporting.
