Our vision for Vertex AI Search, unveiled earlier this year and made generally available in August, is to leverage our deep experience in information retrieval and generative AI to help enterprises enable their customers, employees, and other stakeholders to discover critical information at speed, uncover hidden insights across data, and improve productivity.
The easy setup and out-of- box capabilities of Vertex AI Search reduce the time it takes to build search applications from weeks and months to mere days or hours. Moreover, with the ability to add custom embeddings and leverage large language models (LLM), Vertex AI Search provides customers with a tunable Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system for information discovery. Since its launch, we have seen customers use Vertex AI Search with Vertex AI Conversation for a wide range of applications that combine generative AI and semantic search, from intranet and website search to digital assistants.
For example, Forbes recently announced the beta launch of Adelaide, a purpose-built news search tool, created using Vertex AI Search and Conversation, that offers visitors AI-driven personalized recommendations and insights from Forbes’ trusted journalism. Adelaide’s search- and conversation-based approach makes content discovery easier and more intuitive for Forbes’ global audience, combing through Forbes’ trusted content archive from the past twelve months, continuously learning, and adapting to individual reader preferences.
“As we look to the future, we are enabling our audiences to better understand how AI can be a tool for good and enhance their lives,” said Vadim Supitskiy, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Forbes. “Adelaide is poised to revolutionize how Forbes audiences engage with news and media content, offering a more personalized and insightful experience from start to finish.”
GE Appliances uses Vertex AI Search to power their SmartHQ Assistance experience for their appliances. “At GE Appliances, we constantly strive to deliver the products and experiences that resonate with our consumers. Earlier this year, we rolled out the SmartHQ Assistant experience which enables our consumers to seamlessly interact with their appliances. By leveraging Vertex AI Search, we were able to deliver this uniquely personalized experience with unprecedented speed and accuracy,” said Adam Jones, Senior Director, Cloud Products and IoT Services at GE Appliances.
Today, we’re thrilled to build on this momentum by announcing additional customization and expanded grounding and compliance capabilities for customers to develop even more powerful and secure search, chat, and personalized recommendation applications.
Tailored search to fit business needs
Our new generative AI features address the needs of organizations, especially large enterprises, that want to more deeply customize AI-driven search:
Customizable answers: With customizable answers, now in preview, Vertex AI Search lets developers design the prompt used to generate summarization/answers, giving them control over the style, tone, length, and format of information presented. In addition, for some use cases, developers might also expose part of the prompt to end users, generally as drop-down options that provide options such as “Short,” “Verbose,” “Casual,” or “Formal” answer styles.
For example, if a user asks “What is Vertex AI Model Garden,” a standard response might look like this:
Vertex AI Model Garden is a managed service for discovering, managing, and deploying machine learning models. It provides a unified interface to pre-trained models from Google and third-party partners, as well as tools for customizing, tuning, and deploying models to production.
A response that’s been prompted to be “simple,” in contrast, might output something like this:
Vertex AI Model Garden is a place to find and use machine learning models for tasks like image classification, natural language processing, and translation.
