The competition and excitement in the chatbot race has gone up a notch with tech giant Google officially launching its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Bard, to take on rival Open AI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft. As announced at the annual Google developers conference in Silicon Valley last Thursday, the new tool will be rolled out in over 180 countries. Bard has been imbibed into 25 products, including Maps and Gmail, and will let users write mail responses with the help of the AI chatbot.
“Seven years into our journey as an AI-first company, we are at an exciting inflection point,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, told thousands of developers gathered for the event. “With generative AI, we’re taking the next step, with a bold and responsible approach, we are re-imagining all of our products.” However, one noticeable key decision Google has taken differently than Microsoft is that unlike ChatGPT which is ingrained into Bing search, Bard chatbot will not be included in the Google search.
The traditional Google search will still be used for finding and seeking information, such as locating something to purchase. Whereas Bard AI chatbot, which has a persona that can hold human-like conversations, will be used for “creative collaboration” for instance, to generate software code or write a caption for a photo. These answers will be corroborated by authoritative websites, and it will also continue including ads in responses.
The company’s AI efforts would be carried out in a “bold and responsible” way, as senior product director Jack Krawczyk said during the briefing. Bard will be modified to support 40 languages in coming months, he explained. The new Google search with AI is yet to be released for mass internet users. The first to get exclusive access would be US users in coming weeks via a wait list. During this initial phase, Google will monitor the quality, speed and cost of search results. Google said Bard is now available with no wait list in 180 countries. Initially, the Google Bard chatbot was only available in the UK and the US.
Chatbots have been around since Eliza from the 1960s, but new AI technologies like large language models and generative AI have made them profoundly more useful. LLMs are trained to spot patterns across vast collections of text from the Internet, books and other sources, and generative AI can use that analysis to respond to text prompts with human-sounding written conversation.
It’s a revolution in what computers can offer, combining a wealth of information with a natural interface. Chatbots have shown skills in writing poetry, answering philosophy questions, constructing software, passing exams and offering tax advice. But modern chatbots also are prone to making up data, and their backers are working hard to keep them from contributing to problems like abuse, misinformation, hacking and sexual harassment. And those are just near-term worries. Today’s AI is powerful enough to trigger fears about wiping out white-collar jobs and undermining civilisation.
Despite pioneering some of the technology behind new chatbots, Google was somewhat late to the party. OpenAI’s ChatGPT website sparked a surge in interest. Microsoft, an OpenAI investor, built the underlying GPT-4 technology into its own Bing search engine. One tricky part of AI chatbots is figuring out where they got their information. That opacity makes it hard to verify facts, attribute information to appropriate sources and generally understand why a chatbot offered the results it did. Google hopes to help with this problem with an improvement coming soon, initially with responses involving programming code.