Table of Contents
In Short
Google Bard is now available in 180 countries.
Bard is an AI-powered chatbot developed by Google.
Google also announced upcoming features for Bard during Google I/O.
Google Bard: How to Use Google’s AI Chatbot
The world is experimenting with generative AI and Google doesn’t want to be left behind in the race. After the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Bing AI, Google unveiled Bard, its own AI-powered chatbot, in February this year. However, at the time of launch, Bard had various limitations and was available only to a few trusted testers. Eventually, Google rolled out Bard’s access for users in the UK and the US.
And now, during Google’s annual mega event, the Google I/O, the tech giant announced that the wait for Bard comes to an end and that the chatbot is now available for all. In India too, you can use Google’s Bard by following a few simple steps & knows about Google Bard: How to Use Google’s AI Chatbot
What is Google Bard?
As mentioned already, Bard is a conversational AI chatbot unveiled by Google in February this year. It works in a way similar to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing. The AI-powered chatbot can help users search for important information, solve coding problems, come up with content ideas, and much more. Bard was announced around the same time as Bing and the two new chatbots took the internet by storm.
In other words, just like ChatGPT, Bard AI too is a large language model (LLM) that has ingested a vast amount of data and then has learned from that data to chat with users and provide them the relevant information on Google Bard: How to Use Google’s AI Chatbot
Earlier, Bard’s public access was rolled out for the public in March. At that time, Bard was only available for a few users in the UK and US. People also had to sign up for a waitlist to get access to Bard
Now, however, the AI-powered chatbot is available for users in more than 180 countries and territories, including India. And there is no waitlist. Google, during the Google I/O, also said that Bard is now powered by the tech giant’s new state-of-the-art language model, the Palm 2.
In the future, Bard will get some major upgrades and will be more ‘visual’ in its responses.
How to access Google Bard in India
To access Bard, you can head over to bard.google.com. A message saying that the chatbot is still being tested will be displayed. You will then see an option that says ‘Try Bard’. Click on the option and accept the company’s privacy policy and that’s it! Bard will be available to you for use and you can start exploring the chatbot.
At the top left of the Bard chat window, you will see the word ‘Experiment’ written right next to Bard. In addition to this, a small message displayed right below the prompt bar reads, “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”
Going forward, Bard will also be available in 40 additional languages. As of now, Bard is already available in Japanese and Korean.
Google Bard’s privacy policy terms
We mentioned earlier that in order to access Bard, you will have to accept its privacy policy terms.
In these terms, Google states that Bard’s responses might be ‘inaccurate or inappropriate’ at times and that the user can leave feedback to improve Bard’s responses.
The policy also states that Google will collect users’ conversation data with Bard along with ‘related product usage information, the general area that the user is in, and their feedback.’ The data is used by Google to improve its products and services as well as machine-learning technologies.
According to default settings, this information will be stored in the user’s Google Account for up to 18 months. However, users have the option of auto-deleting or changing the auto-delete option’s duration to 3 or 36 months.
The policy also cautions users to not include information that can be used to identify them or others while interacting with Bard.
“To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Bard conversations. We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process.
This includes disconnecting your conversations with Bard from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate them. Please do not include information that can be used to identify you or others in your Bard conversations,” it says.
Further, the company also asks people to not rely on Bard’s responses for ‘medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice’.
Google Bard’s upcoming features
Bard also has a few new features in store and Google announced the same during the Google I/O event. Google is working on enhancing its responses and being more visual. One of the ways this will be done is by including images in its responses along with the text.
“In addition to text, you’ll get a helpful response along with rich visuals to give you a much better sense of what you’re exploring,” Google’s official blog post about Bard reads.
Not just the responses, but the users’ prompts will also be able to include images in the future. The company plans to do this by using the powers of Google Lens.
Apart from this, Bard will also be integrated with Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps, and other Google apps that are used by people on a day-to-day basis. The AI chatbot, working in collaboration with Adobe Firefly, will also be able to generate images, much like Bing’s AI image generator.
Main differences between ChatGPT and Bard
The services of ChatGPT and Bard are similar, with users typing in a query to receive a humanlike response.
In February 2023, Microsoft announced it will release technology for large companies to create and customize their own chatbots using ChatGPT technology. Microsoft will also embed AI-powered search functions into its Bing search engine and Edge browser with a chat experience to aid a user’s search. Google has not announced when it plans to add AI chatbot functionality to its search engine.
The main difference between ChatGPT and Bard is the data source. Bard continually draws information from the internet, so it has the latest information. ChatGPT’s sources end with 2021 data, so it is limited to newer research and information. Bard has more data to gather information in real-time by accessing the latest research.
Bard uses Google’s newest language model — PaLM 2. ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5 with GPT-4 technology available in its paid version — ChatGPT Plus.
Bard creates more chunks of information, while ChatGPT creates content in a single text prompt.
I’ll walk through some of the core differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard in depth in the coming sections, but here’s a quick breakdown of how they compare.
Comparison :
Creators | OpenAI | |
Language model | A specially tweaked version of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-training Transformer 3 (GPT-3) or Generative Pre-training Transformer 4 (GPT-4), depending on the version | Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) |
Data sources | ChatGPT was trained on a massive dataset of text, including Common Crawl, Wikipedia, books, articles, documents, and content scraped from the open internet—but its sources end in 2021, limiting the latest world events and research | Bard was trained on Infiniset, a data set including Common Crawl, Wikipedia, documents, and conversations and dialogues from the web; Bard will supposedly search the web in real-time to find the most recent answers to questions and the latest research |
Pricing | ChatGPT is free to all users; ChatGPT Plus is billed at $20/month to include access during peak times, faster response times, priority access to new features, and use of GPT-4 | Bard is free to users who have access |
