Building Next-Gen AI Experiences with Google's Gen App Builder

If you’ve been exploring recently-launched consumer generative AI tools like?Bard?and thinking about how to build similar experiences for your business, Generative AI App Builder, or Gen App Builder for short, is here to get you started.

Understanding the Gen App Builder Platform

The Gen App Builder platform is designed to serve both application developers and AI practitioners. For developers who want an easy setup experience, the platform offers out-of-the-box search and chat features. For search developers who want to personalize and build multimodal capabilities, there are configurations and more advanced features. And for AI practitioners who want to build on top of the search platform, there's a "build your own search" mode with advanced model training, tuning, and embeddings.

Building Search Experiences with the Gen App Builder

One of the key benefits of the Gen App Builder is its ability to build personalized and controllable search experiences. The platform provides features such as fastening, autocomplete, summarization, and conversational experiences, all of which are easily configurable and controllable. Additionally, the platform integrates with the Vertex AI platform, allowing practitioners to leverage their institution's domain knowledge to build custom search models, embeddings, and knowledge graphs.

Building Chat Experiences with the Gen App Builder

The Gen App Builder also provides powerful tools for building chat experiences. With pre-built flows that cover common tasks like authentication and order status, developers can drag and drop them onto a canvas and complete a basic form to enable them. Alternatively, developers can describe what needs to be done and what information to collect using natural language, or visually map out business logic and include pre-built and custom tasks.

Use Cases for the Gen App Builder Platform

Some of the most popular uses are in customer service, where generative apps can contribute to increasing revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. For example, if a retail customer reaches out to modify an order, a virtual agent can help them change it to another product. The customer doesn’t even need to provide the new product name—they can just upload an image and let the agent guide them through the rest. Watch?this demo?to see how a retail chatbot can use multimodal capabilities to help a consumer navigate various options on the website, including giving the customer ideas on how to use the product and even helping them complete the purchase with the ability to transact within the conversational UI. This scenario could apply to multiple industries and use cases, ranging from consumer goods and public services, to finance and internal corporate systems like intranets.

Gen App Builder is exciting because unlike most existing generative AI offerings for developers, it offers an orchestration layer that abstracts the complexity of combining various enterprise systems with generative AI tools to create a smooth, helpful user experience. Gen App Builder provides step-by-step orchestration of search and conversational applications with pre-built workflows for common tasks like onboarding, data ingestion, and customization, making it easy for developers to set up and deploy their apps. With Gen App Builder developers can:?

• Build in minutes or hours. With access to Google’s no-code conversational and search tools powered by foundation models, organizations can get started with a few clicks and quickly build high-quality experiences that can be integrated into their applications and websites.?
• Combine the power of foundation models with information retrieval to find relevant, personalized information. Enterprises can build apps that understand user intent via natural language, and surface the right information with associated citations and attributions from a company’s public and private data. They can also fully control what data their applications access and the content or topics they want to address.
• Build multimodal apps that can respond with text, images, and other media. Gen App Builder supports not just text, but also other modalities such as images and videos. It allows developers to build apps using a combination of text and images as inputs to find information across documents, photos, and video content, enabling richer customer interactions.?
• Combine natural conversations with structured flows. Developers can granularly blend the output of foundation models with controls to ground answers in enterprise content, and step-by-step conversation orchestration to guide customers to the right answers.
• Provide the ability to transact and connect to third party apps and services. Gen App Builder makes it simple to create digital assistants and bots that not only serve content, but also connect to purchasing and provisioning systems to enable transactions from the conversational UI, and escalate customer conversations to a human agent when the context demands.?

Google's Gen App Builder provides developers and AI practitioners with a powerful platform to build next-gen AI experiences. With its customizable and controllable search and chat features, the Gen App Builder makes it easy to build personalized and sophisticated AI applications. Whether you're a developer looking for an easy setup experience or an AI practitioner looking to build on top of the search platform, the Gen App Builder has something to offer for everyone.

If you’re interested in a closer look at the Gen App Builder, tune into?this?session at the?Data Cloud & AI Summit.?Take a step forward to getting hands-on and join the waitlist for our?trusted tester program.?And finally, bookmark Google's generative AI?landing page to keep abreast of the latest news, updates and possibilities from this exciting new world of Gen Apps.