Google has officially announced the opening of access to its intelligent chatbot, Bard, as competition intensifies in the field of generative artificial intelligence.
After months during which emerging AI-powered chatbots made headlines, the US tech giant said Bard had become available to trial for more users.
Google explained in a blog post that users in the United States and the United Kingdom can register to try Bard through the link bard.google.com. It added that it would make the bot accessible to more countries and languages over time.
The company said in its publication: “You can use Bard to increase your productivity, speed up your plans, and arouse your curiosity. You might advise Bard to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in easy terms, or stimulate your creativity by selecting a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far with the Bard test, and the next critical step in improving it is getting feedback from more people.”
Google will put some barriers in place to ensure conversations between users and AI don’t get out of control. It said it would cap the number of exchanges in dialogue “to try to keep the interactions useful and relevant.” However, a company spokesperson said that this will not limit the number of daily chats.
Bard will display three different drafts for each response. Google expects the testing phase to help it understand how often people interact with Bard.
The launch comes after months of rapid testing, following the launch of the popular ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI last November, which has since been integrated into the new version of the Bing search engine and the Microsoft Edge web browser, as well as many services and applications around the world.
Google was criticized by employees and investors after the initial launch of the Bard robot, as it seemed to be rushing to compete with Microsoft.
Last Tuesday, Google announced a set of features based on generative artificial intelligence technology, coming to many Office Workspace applications, such as the Google Docs application, the Gmail application, the spreadsheet application (Sheets), and presentations (Slides).
The features include new ways to generate, annotate, and create text with AI in Google Docs, much like how people use chatbots (ChatGBT).
