Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot

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Google just announced that the company is releasing its ChatGPT competitor Bard. But chances are you won’t get access to the product right away, as the company is starting a limited public rollout.

Users in the UK and US can go to bard.google.com and join a waiting list. The company calls Bard an “early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.”

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard is a chatbot based on a large language model. You can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up questions.

When Google first revealed Bard last month, there wasn’t much to see except for a lengthy blog post written by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The model used in Bard is based on Google’s own LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) – the company uses a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA.

At a conference in Paris, Google explained that Bard would work particularly well for “NORA” questions — questions where “no one has the right answer.” Of course, conversational AI also raises questions about accuracy, sources of information, and ethical fallbacks.

In its blog post, Google shared some screenshots of its chatbot product. Users are first presented with a blank chat box with a disclaimer below that says “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that does not reflect Google’s views”.

There are a few sample prompts, but users are free to type whatever they want in the text field. After that, Bard loads the answer and displays it at once. It doesn’t feel like Bard is writing a word-for-word answer, but Google says it works much like other generative AI chatbots. It comes up with the next word based on the previous words.

At the bottom of the answer, you can rate the answer with a thumbs up or thumbs down, resume the conversation, or click a “Google It” button to switch to Google’s search engine.

Unlike Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard doesn’t have web resource footnotes so you can check the correctness of the answer. If you’re not happy with Bard’s answer, Google also gives you the option to see more answers for the same question. You need to click “View other drafts” in the top right corner to load more answers.

At the moment, Bard is a separate product from Google’s search engine. Looks like you can’t interact with Bard from the search results. But Bard is sure to spark some debates about plagiarism and the relationship between Google and third-party websites. This isn’t a new problem, as Google already tries to provide direct answers on Google.com without having to visit a separate website.

In other words, today’s limited release of Bard is the first step in a long process. It will be interesting to see how people interact with the product as it becomes more widely available, and how regulators and content creators feel about Google’s new product.