Mere days after the search engine giant presented the Gemini model, CNBC reports that Google is working on something else: creating a personalized chatbot that can answer “previously impossible questions” about one’s life (via 9to5Google).
According to the source, Project Ellman (named after literary critic Richard David Ellmann, who was the biographer of writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats) will use LLMs (large language models) to gain awareness of the things it’s been fed with.
What’s that got to do with my Google Photos?
In short, if executed correctly Project Ellman could ultimately have a conversation with you about your life based on your photos and search results (if you give Ellman the access it needs) – the goal is for the chatbot to know you in advance and to be “Your Life Story Teller”.
For example, a class reunion could be recognized by the AI project as such, if he sees a photo of you at a class reunion: “It’s exactly 10 years since he graduated and is full of faces not seen in 10 years so it’s probably a reunion.”
“We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment”, a presentation slide seen by CNBC reads: “When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear”.
Also, the chatbot could get a more complete picture of you based on screenshots that you take and come to conclusions about your hobbies, interests, upcoming travel plans and purchases, favorite websites, food photos, and more.
This stuff will surely give some people nightmares.
This technology would come together as a chatbot for a user that was described as: “Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?”
