Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! A day after Microsoft announced that it will deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) to beef up its search engine Bing, Google drew the battle lines as it took to the stage in Paris on Wednesday and announced that it will use generative AI to enhance its search capabilities.

As things stand, Google is absolutely dominant in the search engine game, with ads through search raking in $100 billion in revenue last year. Microsoft — which has backed the wildly popular AI-driven ChatGPT — hopes to grab a slice of this pie by adding new features to its flagging search engine.

At the event, dubbed "Google presents: Live from Paris", the tech giant said adding generative AI to search results will create text or visual responses to prompts and enable users to interact with information in "entirely new ways".

”As we continue to bring generative AI technologies into our products, the only limit to search will be your imagination,” Google’s senior vice present Prabhakar Raghavan said at the event.

This announcement comes on the heels of Google unveiling Bard, its response to ChatGPT. However, there are teething issues as Google's own online ad showed Bard delivering inaccurate answers.

Also read: Google Bard — What is this conversational AI service and how is it different from ChatGPT?

Apart from search, Google also showcased several improvements to Maps, indoor views, image search and translation — all using AI. ”AI is also making it far more natural to make sense of and explore the real world,” Raghavan said.

San Francisco-based OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, opened up its ChatGPT chatbot for free public testing in November. It surged in popularity within days and Microsoft now plans to use the technology to power its Bing search engine.

Google’s ad business is Alphabet’s biggest earner, accounting for about 80 percent of the company’s annual revenue.

Microsoft said it expects every percentage point of market share it gains to bring in another $2 billion in search advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, with the proliferation of AI and is applications, the European Union is planning to introduce regulatory legislation through its AI Act. The proposed legislation, the first of its kind by any major regulator, classifies AI applications under three categories based on risk — "applications and systems that create an unacceptable risk, such as government-run social scoring of the type used in China, are banned. Second, high-risk applications, such as a CV-scanning tool that ranks job applicants, are subject to specific legal requirements. Lastly, applications not explicitly banned or listed as high-risk are largely left unregulated" as per the official website of the legislation.

With Reuters inputs

Also read: Microsoft packs Bing search engine, Edge browser with AI in big challenge to Google