ZDNET’s key takeaways:
- Google Finance is getting an AI upgrade, including a chatbot.
- The upgrade comes with a live news feed, plus other features.
- It will roll out to US users in the coming weeks.
You’ll soon be able to ask Google Finance all your money questions via a new AI chatbot, the company announced in a blog post on Friday. Google says the bot can answer “detailed questions about the financial world” and return responses with relevant web links.
Also: How AI can help you manage your finances (and what to watch out for)
The financial market news and updates platform is also getting new visualization tools like candlestick charts to give users a more fine-grained overview of how their assets are performing. Users will also be able to keep track of a greater variety of commodities, including cryptocurrencies, as well as a live news feed that offers “up-to-the minute headlines and track the latest market intel,” the blog post said.
The changes will be rolled out to US users in the coming weeks, according to the blog post. And for all you AI Luddites out there, the upgraded tool will come with the option to toggle back to the original, chatbotless format.
Also: I used Perplexity to make a restaurant reservation – now I’m wondering if Google is holding us back
While Silicon Valley tries to build AI that will manage — or at least be helpful to — almost every aspect of our lives, a darker side of AI in finance has started to rear its head. Even as it offers new tools to protect financial institutions from fraudsters, the technology has also supercharged fraud itself.
We can put AI in that!
The news arrives at a time when tech developers are racing to embed AI into as many of their products and services as possible, driven by the notion that the technology will essentially serve as the operating system for the future.
Also: Microsoft rolls out GPT-5 across its Copilot suite – here’s where you’ll find it
Google, after being caught off-guard by the viral success of ChatGPT in late 2022, has been especially energetic in its efforts to implement AI as widely throughout its ecosystem as possible. Its AI Overviews have become a core part of its online search engine — the backbone of its business — while its Gemini chatbot has been added to the full suite of Google Workplace apps.
Similar efforts have been adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, Salesforce, and others. Apple, notably, has paid lip service to the adoption of its own generative AI-powered software suite, which it dubbed Apple Intelligence, but doesn’t yet have much to show for it.
The AI proliferation race among big tech firms has been further fueled by the rise of AI agents, which are more dynamic and action-oriented than chatbots and are being marketed to businesses as productivity-boosters.
