Google brings its AI chatbot Bard into its inner circle, opening door to Gmail, Maps, YouTube

Planned Elmwood Hub project combines 115 mixed-income housing units, social supports, programs

A long-awaited project will aim to add 115 new homes in Elmwood, with on-site social programs to support some of its more vulnerable residents.

NDP touts health-care gains, but critics question impact on ER wait times

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara doesn’t mince words when describing how bad things are in the province’s emergency departments and urgent-care centres.

“The wait times that we are seeing in Manitoba are unacceptable,” said Asagwara in an interview with the Free Press.

“I hear from families, I hear from providers, I hear from Manitobans who are concerned about the wait times that they’re seeing, that they’re experiencing, and those concerns are valid — I share those concerns.”

So what is the NDP, who promised voters nearly three years ago it had the answers to bring down wait times, doing about it?

Google brings its AI chatbot Bard into its inner circle, opening door to Gmail, Maps, YouTube

Google is introducing Bard, its artificially intelligent chatbot, to other members of its digital family — including Gmail, Maps and YouTube — as it seeks ward off competitive threats posed by similar technology run by Open AI and Microsoft.

Bard's expanded capabilities announced Tuesday will be provided through an English-only extension that will enable users to allow the chatbot to mine information embedded in their Gmail accounts as well as pull directions from Google Maps and find helpful videos on YouTube. The extension will also open a door for Bard to fetch travel information from Google Flights and extract information from documents stored on Google Drive.

Google is promising to protect users' privacy by prohibiting human reviewers from seeing the potentially sensitive information that Bard gets from Gmail or Drive, while also promising that the data won't used as part of the main way the Mountain View, California, company makes money — selling ads tailored to people's interests.

The expansion is the latest development in an escalating AI battle triggered by the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Microsoft’s push to infuse similar technology in its Bing search engine and its Microsoft 365 suite that includes its Word, Excel and Outlook applications.

ER wait times have hit all-time highs in Winnipeg and are impacting nearly all aspects of hospital operations

On most days at Health Sciences Centre’s adult emergency department, all 58 treatment beds are filled with sick patients. Another dozen or so brought in by ambulance line the hallways on stretchers, with only one nurse to look after them.

Out in the waiting room, about 30 or 40 people — sometimes more — are slouched in chairs in pain or discomfort, waiting hours to see a doctor. Most have been assessed by a triage nurse, but many will have to wait 10 to 20 hours to be examined by a physician because there’s no room for them in the treatment area.

Some patients leave because they can no longer tolerate the excruciating wait, only to return days later, sicker than they were before.

Welcome to the emergency department at Manitoba’s largest hospital, where some of the highest-acuity patients seek medical care but now face delays that were unimaginable a few years ago.

Sisters among 137 to begin doctor journey at U of M

Not everyone enters medical school with a built-in study buddy.

Sisters Maya and Dana Jalal joined 135 of their classmates to don white coats and mark the beginning of their journey through the University of Manitoba’s Max Rady College of Medicine Wednesday morning.

Maya, 22, and Dana, 21, were accepted into medical school at the same time.

“Thankfully, we both got accepted in the same area, same time. So we decided we’d rather go together than apart,” Maya said. “It’ll be nice seeing different perspectives during our studies. We are siblings, but we each have our own perspectives, our own lived experiences.”

Summer flooding sinks some fall harvest hopes

A number of Manitoba farmers say they are expecting this year’s harvest to be one of the worst they’ve seen after major flooding decimated fields at the start of summer.

Bob Elliot, who has been farming east of Stonewall for 43 years, said he’s expecting the operation’s 5,500 acres to produce roughly half their normal yield.

Stonewall has logged the most precipitation this summer, with 523 millimetres of rainfall between May 1 and Aug. 16, according to Manitoba’s weather conditions report.

Elliot said the amount of rain has created a “unique” situation for farmers. “This is something that I don’t think anyone around here has ever seen.”