Competition is fierce in the realm of artificial intelligence. While ChatGPT is currently the benchmark, other players – such as Bard and Claude – stand out from the crowd, notably through their constant innovation.

Today, ChatGPT is the world's most widely used conversational AI agent. And its publisher, OpenAI, is far from resting on its laurels, this week announcing a new feature enabling users to voice chat with ChatGPT via the mobile application. But its competitors are not to be outdone, with innovation also in store from Bard and Claude.

Analysing the content of an online video...

Google recently announced that Bard will now be able to answer questions relating to the content of YouTube videos, thanks to a new specially dedicated extension. The idea is that the chatbot can analyse the content of a video to answer a specific question from the user, without them even having to watch it.

Similarly, Bard promises to be able to provide complete summaries of a video. In this case, the risk is obviously that internet users will watch fewer long-form videos and simply ask Bard to find out more about their content. Still, the potential of this extension is huge – all the more so since, in the future, Bard could very well extend its comprehension abilities to other streaming platforms, which could once again revolutionise usage.

This Bard extension is currently only available in the US. The aim of these kinds of extensions is to take advantage of the content of numerous Google services, such as Maps or Flights, but also to extract and analyze data from email messages (Gmail) or online documents (Google Drive).

... or Homer's Iliad

For its part, the American company Anthropic has unveiled an improved version of Claude, its intelligent and ethical conversational agent. Claude is capable of performing searches and summaries, writing texts on a given theme and even writing code, exclusively on the basis of safe, reliable data. Claude 2.1 is a major update that seeks to be even more robust in its responses, and even more conducive to user interaction.

A significant new feature is Claude's ability to analyse the equivalent of over 500 pages of documents for each query, whether online or entrusted to it by the user. That's a lot more than competitor AI platforms, including ChatGPT. In fact, Anthropic calls this "an industry first".

In concrete terms, this enables the AI chatbot to examine entire codebases or epic works like The Iliad. Initially available to researchers and companies, Claude is now starting to be made available in beta version to the general public. – AFP Relaxnews