In the ever-evolving landscape of digital communication, chatbots have emerged as a revolutionary technological advancement, transforming the way we interact with businesses, services, and even each other. These intelligent virtual agents have been seamlessly integrated into websites, messaging platforms, customer support systems, and now into search engines too!
Powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots are reshaping the dynamics of human-computer interactions, offering a personalised and efficient experience like never before. This has been evident with the wide use of ChatGPT and now with Bard.
If it's the first time you’re hearing about Bard, then you don’t have to worry because in this article we’ll explain what this tool is, how it works, and how you can use it either for work or personal reasons.
What is Google Bard?
Bard is an AI-powered chatbot tool designed for collaborative work with generative AI with the purpose of enhancing productivity, creativity and curiosity. Because of the similarities in tasks, you could refer to this tool as “ChatGPT’s rival”. For example, it can help you brainstorm ideas, summarise topics, draft outlines, and it will soon let you generate AI images.
Google’s report on Bard explains how the tool’s been carefully designed, following the company’s AI principles. It also addresses how the company’s planning on collaborating with experts from a range of industries to get a comprehensive understanding of the tool’s appliances, as well as of any possible risks or limitations that may emerge.
Bard is still in its early testing stages, which is why Google has openly admitted that further works are required to provide the most accurate responses. The company’s idea of Bard is to add to the whole search experience, which as a matter of fact, just got upgraded with AI technology as well. So, when using Bard you'll still be able to see a “Google It” button in the responses.
Access to Bard was originally limited to those users that had joined the waitlist. However, since May 2023 the chatbot tool has become available in more than 180 countries.
How does it work?
Just like ChatGPT, Google Bard uses language models to respond to users’ queries. Bard was firstly trained with Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) to support its conversational capabilities. In addition to LaMDA, it’s now been fed with Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM2) too, so it can enhance features like coding and multimodal search, which are yet to be released.
And thanks to recent changes made on Google’s data policies, it will not be too long until the company starts training its AI technologies with all Internet users. Based on these changes, Google could now make use of “publicly available information” to train its AI models and for further product development. This is a vast amount of data considering that Google’s research could cover from Youtube videos to Google Search results and more!
Chatbots’ main attribute is their ability to keep conversations with users, and Bard is no different in that sense. Bard interacts with users through the conversational tone it maintains throughout its responses, after users have typed in their query or prompt into the text box. For instance, you can ask Bard to type a short script for a play. You can go in depth about the specifications of your query. So, you could tell Bard how you’d like the play to be for children or how you’d like it to have dinosaurs in it.
An interesting thing from Bard is that you can even include images in your prompts, a feature that’s been enabled through the multimodal functionality of PaLM2. The use of images in the conversation goes both ways, just as users are able to include them in their queries, Bard is also capable of giving you an answer that includes images or even videos. As we mentioned before, Bard is expected to create AI images and this will be possible thanks to the integration of Adobe Firefly.
Google has big plans for additional AI upgrades that will be coming soon. A few examples include Google Lens and the Immersive View tools, which will allow users explore any city in the world, and improve the overall search experience.
How can you use it?
To use Bard, you first need to sign up at bard.google.com using your Gmail account. You will then have to click on “Try Bard” and accept the terms and conditions. Once you’ve completed these steps, you can get started!
Similar to ChatGPT, Bard works under an input and output basis. Once you’ve fed Bard with a prompt or search term, you hit enter and wait for it to respond. Bard is designed in a way that helps solve more conversational queries, rather than keyword searches. So, instead of listing different answers, it provides context to them and encourages follow-up questions. After you’ve gotten your answer, you can either continue the conversation or go to the traditional search engine.
One of the advantages of the merge between Bard and Google Search is the opportunity users have of gaining a deeper insight into a certain topic. So, if you’re not satisfied with Bard’s answer or need further information, you can click “Google it”. This will take you to the search function.
Whether you want to generate text, translate languages, write different types of creative content, or answer informative questions, Bard can help you perform these tasks and much more! It can even assist with sorting out code writing in numerous programming languages.
With AI becoming more and more prevalent, users are now presented with several tools that can help them embrace higher productivity and efficiency levels. Whether it’s through ChatGPT or Google Bard, you definitely have a starting point to adopt AI into your daily work.
Although Google is still experimenting with Bard, it will be interesting to see what other features it will be upgraded with to differentiate it from its biggest competitor, and how Google continues adopting AI in its current products.
We’ve covered what Bard is, how it works and how you can use it. Hopefully, this article has given you a more clear idea of how to leverage this tool on your advantage. Check our AI Hub for more AI content that will skyrocket your digital marketing strategy!
