Google has officially unleashed its AI-powered chatbot called Bard.
Google’s launch of Bard is likely a response to the recent chatbot craze driven by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a sign to the world (and shareholders) that Google is capable of keeping up with its competitors and creating technology to match ChatGPT.
What is Bard?
Bard is an AI-powered chatbot that can instantly produce thorough answers in complete sentences that looks and sounds like a human has written them. It is, arguably, a much more efficient way of providing information to people searching than sending them a list of links to different websites.
For example, which of the following do you find more useful as an answer to: “What are some examples of indoor house plants that are easy to maintain?”
With AI chatbots providing a genuine threat to Google’s most lucrative business (its traditional search engine), Bard is Google’s way to ensure it doesn’t fall too far behind its competitors.
How to use Bard?
The new AI chatbot is initially available to a limited number of users in the United States and the UK. According to Google executives, the plan is to accommodate additional users, countries, and languages over time.
Users are able to join a waitlist at bard.google.com.
Like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard provides a blank text box and an invitation to ask any question you can possibly think of.
Is Bard better than ChatGPT?
Bard has some advantages over ChatGPT. Firstly, it is connected to the internet so it can provide timely information. ChatGPT is only trained with data up until 2021, so cannot answer questions relating to current events. Bard can.
Many users are also reporting that Bard is much quicker compared to its rivals.
For now, however, Bard doesn’t seem as capable of performing some of the more complex tasks which are possible with GPT-4, like coding.
And very much like its competitors, Bard is also culpable of getting facts wrong and making up information without warning – something researchers call ‘hallucination’.
Closing thoughts
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