Microsoft kicked off its Build conference for developers yesterday. The focus wasn’t on marketing but there was still a lot of relevant news, including use of Bing as the default search engine for ChatGPT, chat interface-driven tools for website building and app creation, and still more chat-driven data preparation, cleaning, and analysis. It seems the next step beyond low-code development is voice-based coding, or vo-code.
It seems like just last week that we wrote about AI-related announcements at the Google I/O conference, but it was really two weeks. So writing about yesterday’s Google Marketing Live isn’t repetitive at all. There were more AI-related announcements, include a chat-based interface to set up Google Ads campaigns, AI-generated assets for Performance Max display campaigns, and AI-generated search ads.
Meta has its own AI news, including release of open source text-to-speech and speech-to-text models support more than 1,100 languages. But mostly they’ve trying get their business in order. They took another step in that direction yesterday by selling GIPHY, which they bought for $400 million in 2020 but couldn’t keep due to anti-trust issues. Buyer was Shutterstock, which paid $53 million.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.