Google has announced the imminent arrival of the next-generation AI-powered chatbot named Bard. Touted as ChatGPT rival, Bard will be developed based on Google’s LaMDA and will be available for public testing soon. According to rumors, Google Bard will ship with voice-enabled functionality, which is missing with ChatGPT. Google will reveal the features and demo of Bard during the Google event on February 8 in Paris. That said, Google Bard will be completely free unlike ChatGPT plus version for $20 per month.
In an interesting development, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted a detailed blog about the upcoming Bard AI chatbot. Normally, Sundar will not announce any features but this time he took the charge of leading the company’s revolutionary AI-enabled Chatbot. In his post, Sundar revealed that Bard is an experimental service that is made available for public testing. The chatbot will be available for closed testing among waitlisted people and then it will be made available widely. Google Bard is based on LaMBA technology, which is the company’s Language Model for Dialogue applications. The blog post also shows a small demo of Bard, where the chatbot throws in answers quickly.
According to Pichai, Google has been working on an experimental conversational AI chatbot powered by LaMBA for a long time. Bard is the buzzword given to enable people to easily recognize the AI tool. Bard will throw open to trusted testers ahead of general availability in the upcoming weeks. Even though Google’s LaMDA is available for closed waitlisted testing via its AI Test Kitchen app, Google has taken an open stand when it comes to Bard by giving access to the general public. We expect that Google Bard will become a household item by May 2023.
Pichai added that users will be able to depend on Bard to simplify complex topics. This includes deep understanding of the James Webb Space Telescope among others. The small animation image shared on the post reveals that Bard will be able to provide answers in a conversational manner. You will be able to fetch the output in long paragraphs identical to that of the ChatGPT.
It looks like Bard will be a much smaller and lightweight mode that requires significantly less computing power. This will enable the chatbot to scale to several users for the purpose of feedback gathering. Google will refine Bard based on the collected feedback. We don’t know how a user can access Bard. However, the company will provide both web-based access and an exclusive mobile app at a later stage. Google Vice President Prabhkar will reveal the capabilities of bard during the google event on February 8.
It’s hectic competition between Google and Microsoft. Just after Google’s revelation, Microsoft also announced a surprise AI event in collaboration with OpenAI. Microsoft will reveal the integration of ChatGPT into the Bing search engine and the roadmap. There are reports that ChatGPT surfaced on Bing two days back for a short period of time before it disappeared.
It will interesting to see what Microsoft and Google have cooked up. If you are unaware, Quora also launched the AI-activated chatbot Poe for iOS users. The company announced that Poe will be available for Android and other platforms soon. Going forward, we expect more companies to come up with new AI adventures.
