People wanting a New York hotel near a Christmas market, a vegan restaurant or any another attraction need look no further than artificial intelligence (AI) from Alphabet Inc’s Google at Priceline as early as this summer, the companies said.
The online travel agency, part of Booking Holdings Inc, aims to debut a more sophisticated chatbot for planning trips, as well as hotel suggestions that are like “a personal concierge” tailored to users, Priceline chief technology officer Martin Brodbeck said.
“You can easily find out that in Bryant Park there’s a Christmas market that runs from early November all the way through the beginning of January when you’re actually booking your hotel,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
New tools from Google’s cloud division give Priceline access to generative AI, like the technology behind ChatGPT that can draft text as if a human wrote it. The tools also extract information such as hotel prices from existing data to ensure accuracy.
For Priceline, the embrace of novel technology could give it an edge over myriad sites that market travel options, Google among them.
Google’s capabilities, not competition, led to the partnership, Brodbeck said.
For Google, drawing business through AI represents a potential way to close the gap with rivals Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, against which it has long been a distant No. 3 provider of cloud services such as data storage.
The ability to build applications atop technology that Google pioneered has attracted customers new and old, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
“There is a kind of a Cambrian moment happening now where there’s an explosion of this technology,” Kurian said, referring to the extraordinary prehistoric period when a wide array of new species emerged.
He declined to answer how free corporate previews were affecting Google Cloud’s profitability, but said the company is focused on cost efficiency, and that with great products the “business will take care of itself.”
Among other uses, Google’s AI would be generating coding suggestions for hundreds of software developers at Priceline, Brodbeck said.
Priceline plans to adopt Google’s search capabilities for employee intranets, and Google’s AI would speed up marketing for trending destinations.
“You could have it create images like a beautiful beach, and you could marry that with great generative-AI copy,” Brodbeck said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day