Alphabet Inc., the company that owns Google, announced on Monday that it will introduce a chatbot service and more artificial intelligence for its search engine and developers as a response to Microsoft Corp. in their competition to dominate a new computing era.

Microsoft, meanwhile, announced that its own AI announcement would occur on Tuesday.

The cascade of news shows how Silicon Valley is preparing for profound change brought on by so-called "generative AI," a tool that can generate text or other content at will and free up the time of white-collar workers.

One of Google's greatest challenges in recent memory has been the rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI that might change how consumers search for information.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post that his company is launching a conversational AI service called Bard to gather user feedback before going live to the general public.

Additionally, he mentioned Google's plans to incorporate AI features into its search engine that will synthesize information for complex queries like which instrument is easier to learn, the guitar or the piano. Currently, Google displays text from other websites on the Web in response to questions with obvious answers.

The company is strengthening its service, while Microsoft is doing the same for Bing by integrating OpenAI's capabilities into it. Google's update for search, the timing of which it did not disclose, shows how the company is doing this.

According to an invitation seen by Reuters, Microsoft has stated that it plans to incorporate AI into all of its products. On Tuesday, Satya Nadella, the company's CEO, will brief media outlets on unspecified developments. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that he would also be at the event.

It's unclear how Google intends to set Bard apart from OpenAI's ChatGPT. Pichai claimed that the new service uses data from the internet and that ChatGPT's knowledge is current as of 2021.

According to Pichai, "Bard seeks to combine the depth of human knowledge with the strength, intelligence, and creativity of our" AI.

LaMDA, Google's artificial intelligence, is the brains behind the new chatbot. LaMDA produced text with such skill that a company engineer last year referred to it as sentient, a claim that the tech giant and scientists widely rejected.

In a demonstration of the service, Bard invites users to give it a prompt but warns that its response may be inappropriate or inaccurate, just like its rival chatbot. The demo showed that it then provided three bulleted responses to a question regarding the findings of a space telescope.

In order to serve more users and improve based on their feedback, Google is using a version of LaMDA that uses less processing power, according to Pichai.

Due to its rapid growth, ChatGPT has occasionally had to turn away users. According to UBS analysts, it had 57 million unique visitors in December, possibly outpacing TikTok in terms of adoption.

Beginning the following month, Pichai said, Google also intends to provide creators and businesses with technology tools, initially powered by LaMDA and then by other AI.