What is Google Bard? Here’s how to use this ChatGPT rival

Cade Metz reports on artificial intelligence and Nico Grant reports on Google from San Francisco. Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks. A recent report even indicated that Bard was trained using ChatGPT data without permission. That Google Bard displayed this erroneous information with such confidence caused heavy criticism of the tool, drawing comparisons with some of ChatGPT’s weaknesses. As Google warns, though, it’s not recommended to use Bard’s text output as a final product.

Gemini has undergone several large language model (LLM) upgrades since it launched. Initially, Gemini, known as Bard at the time, used a lightweight model version of LaMDA that required less computing power and could be scaled to more users. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards.

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name and developed as a direct response to the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it was launched in a limited capacity in March 2023 before expanding to other countries in May. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models.

Frustrated by the executive response, De Freitas and Shazeer left Google near the end of 2021 to start their own company — despite CEO Sundar Pichai personally requesting they stay and continue working on the chatbot, per the Journal. Their company, which now goes by Character.Ai, has since released a chatbot that can roleplay as figures like Elon Musk or Nintendo’s Mario. Per the Journal, De Freitas and Shazeer were able to build a chatbot, which they called Meena, that could argue about philosophy, speak casually about TV shows, and generate puns about horses and cows. They believed that Meena could radically change the way people search online, their former colleagues told the Journal. Google AI researchers invented several key innovations that went into the creation of ChatGPT.

When was Google Bard released?

In ZDNET’s experience, Bard also failed to answer basic questions, had a longer wait time, didn’t automatically include sources, and paled in comparison to more established competitors. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Bard “a souped-up Civic” compared to ChatGPT and Bing Chat, now Copilot. Yes, in late May 2023, Gemini was updated to include images in its answers. The images are pulled from Google and shown when you ask a question that can be better answered by including a photo. Android users will have the option to download the Gemini app from the Google Play Store or opt-in through Google Assistant. Once they do, they will be able to access Gemini’s assistance from the app or via anywhere that Google Assistant would typically be activated, including pressing the power button, corner swiping, or even saying “Hey Google.”

LaMDA had been developed and announced in 2021, but it was not released to the public out of an abundance of caution. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and its subsequent popularity caught Google executives off-guard and sent them into a panic, prompting a sweeping response in the ensuing months. After mobilizing its workforce, the company launched Bard in February 2023, which took center stage during the 2023 Google I/O keynote in May and was upgraded to the Gemini LLM in December.

Google has no history of charging customers for services — cloud business notwithstanding. The assumption  was that the chatbot would be integrated into Google’s basic search engine, and therefore be free to use. Whether it’s applying AI to radically transform our own products or making these powerful tools available to others, we’ll continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. And it’s just the beginning — more to come in all of these areas in the weeks and months ahead.

Better Bard citations of source material

Microsoft is set to announce more details about using ChatGPT in its products at a news conference on Tuesday. For each chatbot, we collect between 1600 and 2400 individual conversation turns through about 100 conversations. Each model response is labeled by crowdworkers to indicate if it is sensible and specific. The sensibleness of a chatbot is the fraction of responses labeled “sensible”, and specificity is the fraction of responses that are marked “specific”. The results below demonstrate that Meena does much better than existing state-of-the-art chatbots by large margins in terms of SSA scores, and is closing the gap with human performance. The system, named Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), is a large language model trained to collect medical information and conduct clinical conversations.

Google Bard lets you give prompts via voice using your device’s microphone, which is neat for a hands-free experience. It also offers a quick “Google it” button which gives you in-line links to continue research outside of Bard. One other neat feature of Bard is “drafts.” Each time you enter a prompt and start a conversation with Bard, it’ll offer you different drafts, or variations of responses.

In a continuation of that pattern, the new Gemini mobile app launching today won’t be available in Europe or the UK for now. Gemini’s latest upgrade to Gemini should have taken care of all of the issues that plagued the chatbot’s initial release. The actual performance of the chatbot also led to much negative feedback. Soon, users will also be able to access Gemini on mobile via the newly unveiled Gemini Android app or the Google app for iOS.

Google Bard vs. ChatGPT: features

Like most AI chatbots, Gemini can code, answer math problems, and help with your writing needs. To access it, all you have to do is visit the Gemini website and sign into your Google account. ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. But the most important question we ask ourselves when it comes to our technologies is whether they adhere to our AI Principles.

It enables content creators to specify SEO keywords and tone of voice in their prompts. Kambhampati also says Google’s claim that 100 AI experts were impressed by Gemini is similar to a toothpaste tube boasting that “eight out of 10 dentists” recommend its brand. It would be more meaningful for Google to show clear improvements on reducing the hallucinations that language models experience when serving web search results, he says.

The best part is that Google is offering users a two-month free trial as part of the new plan. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay.

Even the Opera browser has also pledged to integrate ChatGPT in the future. But Google’s AI plans may now finally see the light of day, even as discussions around whether its chatbot can be responsibly launched continue. The company’s chatbot, Bard, will come after Microsoft — whose stock is on the rise — released its own chatbot through Bing. Google’s not only advising its own employees about potential privacy issues when using AI chatbots, but it’s warning its users too – albeit the notice isn’t so easy to find.

“Google was hesitant to productize this,” said John Hennessy, a Stanford University professor and board member of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in an April talk. Create a new project (or select an existing one) and add a service account to it. Give the service account the Project Owner role (if not given by default). Google has rebranded G Suite to Google Workspace for business customers, making Google Chat an integral experience to Workspace, which provides a means of communications with colleagues and clients. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily.

His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues. “Google’s core existence has been threatened by Microsoft,” says Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO of Perplexity AI, a search startup that is using technology like that at work in ChatGPT and Bard. Google says early users of Bard have found it a useful aid for generating ideas or text.

Consistently using a code interpreter to fix his code, he described the change as “night and day, for both speed and answer quality” after experiencing ChatGPT-4 being “unreliable and a little dull for weeks.” A computer scientists team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore is unofficially calling the method a “jailbreak” but is more officially a “Masterkey” process. This system uses chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing Chat, against one another in a two-part training method that allows two chatbots to learn each other’s models and divert any commands against banned topics. When the new Gemini launches, it will be available in English in the US to start, followed by availability in the broader Asia Pacific region in English, Japanese, and Korean.

Google is also expected to open up Google Bard to third-party developers in the future. On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider’s parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company’s advertising practices. “It caused a bit of a stir inside of Google,” Shazeer said in an interview with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month. “But eventually we decided we’d probably have more luck launching stuff as a startup.” Many technical experts in the AI field have criticized Lemoine’s statements and questioned their scientific correctness.

Bard and ChatGPT show enormous potential and flexibility but are also unpredictable and still at an early stage of development. That presents a conundrum for companies hoping to gain an edge in advancing and harnessing the technology. For a company like Google with large established products, the challenge is particularly difficult. Bard, like ChatGPT, will respond to questions about and discuss an almost inexhaustible range of subjects with what sometimes seems like humanlike understanding. Google showed WIRED several examples, including asking for activities for a child who is interested in bowling and requesting 20 books to read this year.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Both tools are fairly basic, mostly consisting of just an empty search box. They both let you access previous chats, as well as edit previous chats to regenerate responses. ChatGPT and Google Bard are very similar natural language AI chatbots, meaning they largely do the same thing. Ask it a question or give it some kind of prompt, and it’ll give you an answer.

Collins also acknowledges that some have successfully got it to misbehave, although he did not specify how or exactly what restrictions Google has tried to place on the bot. Our best end-to-end trained Meena model, referred to as Meena (base), achieves a perplexity of 10.2 (smaller is better) and that translates to an SSA score of 72%. Compared to the SSA scores achieved by other chabots, our SSA score of 72% is not far from the 86% SSA achieved by the average person. The full version of Meena, which has a filtering mechanism and tuned decoding, further advances the SSA score to 79%.

It might not roll off the tongue like ChatGPT or Windows Copilot, but it’s a large language model chatbot all the same. Executives thwarted multiple attempts made by the engineers to send the bot to external researchers, add the chat feature to Google Assistant, and launch a demo to the public, the Journal reported. Around 2018, Daniel De Freitas, who was a research engineer at Google, started working on an AI side project with the goal of creating a conversational chatbot that mimicked the ways humans speak, former colleagues told the Journal.

Indeed, it is no longer a rarity to interact in a very normal way on the Web with users who are not actually human—just open the chat box on almost any large consumer Web site. “That said, I confess that reading the text exchanges between LaMDA and Lemoine made quite an impression on me! Perhaps most striking are the exchanges related to the themes of existence and death, a dialogue so deep and articulate that it prompted Lemoine to question whether LaMDA could actually be sentient.

Bard is also now available in Japanese and Korean, with up to 40 languages to be supported soon, according to Google. In other countries where Gemini is available, the minimum age is 13 unless otherwise specified by the law. Bard – now Gemini — users must be 18 or older and have a personal Google account. Revolutionize your ad strategy with the best online advertising tools by Clever Ads, incorporating cutting-edge AI for marketing success. Elevate your online presence and stay ahead your competitors with our expertise and AI for digital marketing.

We have a long history of using AI to improve Search for billions of people. BERT, one of our first Transformer models, was revolutionary in understanding the intricacies of human language. Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. In its announcement, Google was careful to acknowledge that large language models (LLMs) like LaMDA aren’t perfect and that mistakes happen.

That may be inspired by the downright ebullient chatbots launched by some smaller AI upstarts, such as Pi from startup Inflection AI and the various app-specific personae that ChatGPT’s custom GPTs now have. When Google first unveiled the Gemini AI model it was portrayed as a new foundation for its AI offerings, but the company had held back the most powerful version, saying it needed more testing for safety. That version, Gemini Ultra, is now being made available inside a premium version of Google’s chatbot, called Gemini Advanced. Accessing it requires a subscription to a new tier of the Google One cloud backup service called AI Premium. Typically, a $10 subscription to Google One comes with 2 terabytes of extra storage and other benefits; now that same package is available with Gemini Advanced thrown in for $20 per month. It is a software that allows you to meet the needs of the customer allowing you to learn to prepare your team for success and keep your company in perfect sync.

“You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,” Hsiao and Collins wrote. As Tremblay notes, a major problem for AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard is their tendency to confidently state incorrect information as fact. The systems frequently “hallucinate” — that is, make up information — because they are essentially autocomplete systems.

Just click the share icon under an answer from Bard, and click where you want it export to. On March 21, 2023, Google began opening access to Bard, inviting users to join a waitlist. On May 10, 2023, Google removed the waitlist and made Bard available in over 180 countries google bot chat and territories. Sundar is the CEO of Google and Alphabet and serves on Alphabet’s Board of Directors. Under his leadership, Google has been focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small.

And it will be possible for users to give feedback on its answers to help Google refine the bot by clicking a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, with the option to type in more detailed feedback. Google also said its latest AI technologies – such as LaMDA, PaLM, image generator Imagen and music creator MusicLM – would be integrated into its search engine. Pichai said new AI-powered features in its search engine would distill complex information and multiple perspectives into “easy-to-digest” formats. Researchers have long sought for an automatic evaluation metric that correlates with more accurate, human evaluation. Doing so would enable faster development of dialogue models, but to date, finding such an automatic metric has been challenging.

Surprisingly, in our work, we discover that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural seq2seq model, exhibits a strong correlation with human evaluation, such as the SSA value. The lower the perplexity, the more confident the model is in generating the next token (character, subword, or word). Conceptually, perplexity represents the number of choices the model is trying to choose from when producing the next token. Existing human evaluation metrics for chatbot quality tend to be complex and do not yield consistent agreement between reviewers.

On February 8, Google introduced the new Google One AI Premium Plan, which costs $19.99 per month, the same as OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s premium plans, ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro. With the subscription, users get access to Gemini Advanced, which is powered by Ultra 1.0, Google’s most capable AI model. In its July wave of updates, Google added multimodal search, allowing users the ability to input pictures as well as text to the chatbot. Then, in December 2023, Google upgraded Gemini again, this time to Gemini, the company’s most capable and advanced LLM to date. Specifically, Gemini uses a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for English. More recently, we’ve invented machine learning techniques that help us better grasp the intent of Search queries.

Pichai says he thinks of this launch both as a big moment for Bard and as the very beginning of the Gemini era. But if Google’s benchmarking is right, the new model might already make Bard as good a chatbot as ChatGPT. Completing this quest earns you a badge to recognize your achievement. You can make your badge or badges public and link to them in your online resume or social media account. Specifying an action object for the button creates an interactive card.

Language might be one of humanity’s greatest tools, but like all tools it can be misused. Models trained on language can propagate that misuse — for instance, by internalizing biases, mirroring hateful speech, or replicating misleading information. And even when the language it’s trained on is carefully vetted, the model itself can still be put to ill use. That meandering quality can quickly stump modern conversational agents (commonly known as chatbots), which tend to follow narrow, pre-defined paths.

” Learning about a topic like this can take a lot of effort to figure out what you really need to know, and people often want to explore a diverse range of opinions or perspectives. We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. Thanks to Ultra 1.0, Gemini Advanced can tackle complex tasks such as coding, logical reasoning, and more, according to the release. One AI Premium Plan users also get 2TB of storage, Google Photos editing features, 10% back in Google Store rewards, Google Meet premium video calling features, and Google Calendar enhanced appointment scheduling. According to Gemini’s FAQ, as of February, the chatbot is available in over 40 languages, a major advantage over its biggest rival, ChatGPT, which is available only in English.

This motivated us to design a new human evaluation metric, the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures basic, but important attributes for natural conversations. Google’s Bard artificial intelligence chatbot will answer a question about how many pandas live in zoos quickly, and with a surfeit of confidence. Instead, Google believes that AI chatbots can be useful tools to support patients that might not have access to healthcare. But deploying such a system in the real world is risky, and will require more work to use it responsibly, they said. Chatbots is that Bard produces three “drafts” in response to a prompt, allowing users to pick the response they prefer or pull text from a combination of them, per MIT Technology Review’s Will Douglas Heaven. It also pulls from more up-to-date information on the web, while ChatGPT’s knowledge pool is restricted to before 2021, per the Times.

Previously, Gemini had a waitlist that opened on March 21, 2023, and the tech giant granted access to limited numbers of users in the US and UK on a rolling basis. LaMDA was built on Transformer, Google’s neural network architecture that the company invented and open-sourced in 2017. Interestingly, GPT-3, the language model ChatGPT functions on, was also built on Transformer, according to Google. It can be literal or figurative, flowery or plain, inventive or informational. That versatility makes language one of humanity’s greatest tools — and one of computer science’s most difficult puzzles. Much like you can with ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing AI, you’ll be able to talk to Bard like you would a friend, using natural language instead of a stilted series of keywords.

• Microsoft is set to announce more details about using ChatGPT in its products at a news conference on Tuesday.
• We extract each conversation training example, with seven turns of context, as one path through a tree thread.
• Google Bard lets you give prompts via voice using your device’s microphone, which is neat for a hands-free experience.
• Being able to keep everyone in the team updated is significant especially for teams who work remotely.
• It also pulls from more up-to-date information on the web, while ChatGPT’s knowledge pool is restricted to before 2021, per the Times.

Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity. However, similar to OpenAI and Microsoft’s chatbots, Bard has not been released to a broader audience due to concerns about generating untrustworthy information and potential biases against certain groups. The company’s internal teams, including AI safety researchers, are working collaboratively to accelerate approval for a range of new AI products.

You can ask it to write an email to customer service for getting a refund or plan your six-person vacation to Spain. However, like ChatGPT, Google’s AI technology isn’t fully there yet — responses may be inaccurate or even offensive, according to Google. Like ChatGPT, Google Bard is a conversational AI chatbot that can generate text of all kinds. You can ask it any question, as long as it doesn’t violate its content policies, Bard will provide an answer.