At Google’s Mountain View headquarters this week, a man clad in a rainbow-hued dressing gown emerged from a giant coffee cup to give a vibrant if somewhat surreal demonstration of the company’s latest achievements in generative AI.

At the I/O event, electronic musician and YouTuber Marc Rebillet tinkered with an AI music tool that can generate synced tracks based on prompts like “viola” and “808 hip-hop beat”. The AI, he told developers, came up with ways to “fill in the sparser elements of my loops?.?.?.?It’s like having this weird friend that’s just like ‘try this, try that’.”

What Rebillet was describing is an AI assistant, a personalised bot that is supposed to help you work, create or communicate better, and interface with the digital world on your behalf. This new class of products has stolen the limelight this week among a flurry of new AI developments from Google and its AI division DeepMind, as well as Microsoft-backed OpenAI.