Google announced last week that A.I. was coming to its productivity apps which businesses pay to use. Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.
The immense attention on ChatGPT reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. Thus, Google on Tuesday invited people in the United States and Britain to test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its gradual path to catch up with Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.
Users can now join a waitlist to gain access to Bard, which promises to help users outline and write essay drafts, plan a friend’s baby shower, and get lunch ideas based on what’s in the fridge.
Click here to join the waitlist: bard.google.com
Bard
Bard, ChatGPT and other similar artificial intelligence apps churn out essays, poems or computing code on command and have taken the world by storm as the biggest new thing in tech since the advent of the iPhone.
Images credit: google, unsplash
Bard is a stand-alone webpage featuring a question box. At the bottom of an answer there is a button to “Google it,” which takes users to a new tab with a conventional Google search results page on the topic. Google executives pitched Bard as a creative tool designed to draft emails and poems and offer guidance on how to get children involved in new hobbies like fly-fishing.
The company is keen to see how people use the technology, and will further refine the chatbot based on use and feedback, the executives.
How does it Operate?
1. Users are first presented with a blank chatbox with a disclaimer right under it that says ,“Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views. Thereafter, Bard loads the answer and displays it all at once. It doesn’t feel like Bard is writing a word-by-word answer, but Google says that it works pretty much like other generative AI chatbots. It comes up with the next word based on the previous words.
2. At the bottom of the answer, you can rate the answer with a thumbs up or thumbs down, restart the conversation or click on the “Google It” button to switch to Google’s search engine.
3. Unlike Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard doesn’t have footnotes with web sources. Those footnotes can help you check the accuracy of the answer. If you aren’t satisfied with Bard’s answer, Google also gives you the ability to view more answers for the same query. You have to click in the top-right corner named “View other drafts” to load more answers.
Right now, Bard is a separate product from Google’s search engine and will certainly foster some debates about plagiarism and the relationship between Google and third-party websites. This isn’t a new issue as Google already tries to give instant answers on Google.com without having to visit a separate website.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said that after testing Bard with 80,000 Google employees, the chatbot would be tested with the public in the United States and Britain as a “first step” before going out to more countries in other languages.
Still, the release represents a significant step to stave off a threat to Google’s most lucrative business, its search engine. Many in the tech industry believe that Google has a lot to lose and to gain from A.I., which could help a range of Google products become more useful, but could also help other companies cut into Google’s huge internet search business.
A chatbot can instantly produce answers in complete sentences that don’t force people to scroll through a list of results, which is what a search engine would offer.
Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. The immense attention on ChatGPT reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business.
