SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google on Thursday introduced a free artificial intelligence app that will implant the technology on smartphones, enabling people to quickly connect to a digital brain that can write for them, interpret what they're reading and seeing, in addition to helping manage their lives. With the advent of the Gemini app, named after an AI project unveiled late last year, Google will cast aside the Bard chatbot that it introduced a year ago in an effort to catch up with ChatGPT, the chatbot unleashed by the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI in late 2022. Google is immediately releasing a standalone Gemini app for smartphones running on its Android software.