The original of this article first appeared on Elektronik-Information*
Google relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Google search as we know it now will soon be obsolete. Here we explain how to use Google’s chat AI Bard.
In this day and age, Google is all about artificial intelligence, and Google Bard is its flagship product. It is an AI chatbot that was clearly developed as a competitor to the extremely popular ChatGPT.
Although Google Bard replicates many features of ChatGPT, Google has invested heavily in this area and has already made some significant updates that push the tool beyond what ChatGPT can do.
How to use Google Bard
Sundar Pichai, head of Google, presents the ChatGPT competitor Bard at the Google I/O developer conference.
Image: Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa
To use “Google Bard”, simply click on the web app at CHIP and “Start now” or alternatively go directly to bard.google.com. As with all Google products, you must sign in with your Google account. You also have to agree to the terms of service, but once you click on it, you can start using Google Bard quite quickly. Similar to ChatGPT, Bard consists mostly of an empty text field that says “Type here”. Enter your input or question and Bard will provide an answer.
Besides the basics, “Google Bard” has some important features that set it apart from other chatbots. First, every time Bard answers, you also get two more “drafts” of the same answer. Just click “See other drafts” to access the other answers. In this case, one of the drafts provided a detailed recipe for a specific meal, while the other was a slightly modified version of the first draft.
You can also click Regenerate Drafts to have Bard try to reply again. However, I have found that regenerating the designs often produces very similar results. It’s better to edit the prompt by clicking the pencil icon or use a new prompt to get a better answer from Bard.
All of your chats with Bard are displayed in a single scrolling window and cleared when you close the window. You can see (and delete) all of the input in “Bard Activity” in the sidebar, but Bard’s actual responses are not accessible. Luckily, Google allows you to export the answers directly to Gmail or Google Docs. If you use Bard for programming, you can also export to Replit. Just click the share icon under a reply from Bard and choose where you want to export to.
Finally, there’s a Dark Mode that you can enable by clicking the toggle on the bottom left of the sidebar.
What is Google Bard?
Like ChatGPT, Google Bard is an AI chatbot that can generate texts of all kinds. You can ask him any question as long as it doesn’t violate the content guidelines, and Bard will provide an answer. While Bard hasn’t officially replaced Google Assistant, it’s a far more powerful AI assistant.
That’s because Bard is based on Google’s own LLM (Large Language Model) called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the model behind ChatGPT, the engineers at Google trained LaMDA on hundreds of billions of parameters, allowing the AI to “learn” the natural language on its own. The result is a chatbot that can provide amazingly natural and dialog-like answers to any question.
LaMDA was originally announced at Google I/O in 2021 but remained a prototype and was never released to the public. However, when ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Google responded quickly and released a LaMDA-powered chatbot that could compete. Google Bard was first announced in February 2023.
Is Google Bard available?
After the announcement, Google Bard was initially only available to a limited number of users based on a waiting list. But at Google I/O 2023, the company announced that Bard is now open to everyone, which includes 180 countries and territories around the world.
Bard is now also available in Japanese and Korean and will soon support up to 40 languages, according to Google. Google Bard is currently not available in Europe and can only be used here via a VPN.
Bard is still tagged as an “experiment” but is now largely accessible to everyone.
What is Google Bard used for?
Google Bard has many different use cases. With AI chatbots, especially powerful ones like Bard, there are no limits to creativity. It’s a great tool for brainstorming, outlining, and collaborating. People have undoubtedly used it for writing essays, articles, and emails, as well as for creative tasks like story and poetry writing.
And recently, you can also use Bard to write and debug code.
However, as Google warns, using Bard’s text output as the final product is not recommended. It’s a good idea to use Bard’s text generation only as a starting point.
Is Google Bard better than ChatGPT?
Both Google Bard and ChatGPT use natural language models and machine learning to create their chatbots, but each has a different feature set. At the time of writing, ChatGPT is entirely based on data mostly collected through 2021, while Google Bard has the potential to use up-to-date information for its answers and freely search the web. This gives Bard a huge advantage over ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, mostly focuses on conversational questions and answers. It is especially good at creative tasks. According to Google, ChatGPT currently has greater potential to answer more questions in natural language.
A recent report even suggested that Bard was being trained using ChatGPT data without permission. However, Google has denied this allegation, although CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that Bard will soon receive an update to be more competitive with ChatGPT. He called it a “pimped Civic compared to ChatGPT”. This statement was made prior to Google I/O’s announcements, so we’ll have to see how the updates compare in actual usage.
Most importantly, ChatGPT has the ability to store all your chats and neatly organize them into “Conversations” in the sidebar. Bard can currently export your chats but not save them. I like the functionality of Bard’s designs, but in terms of long-term usability, ChatGPT remains the better option.
Limitations of Google Bard
The new Google search will prominently display the chatbot’s results at the top.
Image: Image: Screenshot
Unlike ChatGPT, “Google Bard” has access to the entire Internet. That means it can relate to current events and modern context. However, that doesn’t mean that all of Bard’s information is 100 percent correct. As Google admits, Bard is prone to hallucinations.
As an example, we asked Bard about the publishers of Digital Trends, which it didn’t know correctly, even though all of this information is displayed right on the appropriate About page.
At the first showing on February 6, 2023, Google Bard made a mistake when answering a question about the James Webb Space Telescope’s recent discoveries. It claimed to have taken the first image of an exoplanet outside our solar system, when in fact it happened many years earlier.
The fact that “Google Bard” displayed this erroneous information with such confidence led to severe criticism of the tool, drawing comparisons to some of ChatGPT’s weaknesses. Google’s share price fell several points as a result.
However, Bard’s biggest limitation is the inability to save chats. You can export them, but as soon as you close the window, they’re gone.
Text-to-image creation by Google Bard
Bing Image Creator: What Microsoft can do, Bard should soon be able to do the same.
Image: Image: Screenshot / Microsoft
Google has announced that Bard will soon have text-to-image creation built-in, similar to Bing Chat. Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator is powered by Dall-E, while Bard’s text-to-image generation is done in collaboration with Adobe.
Firefly, as it is called, is Adobe’s generative text-to-image tool introduced in various Adobe creative applications, starting with Adobe Express. Firefly was trained using the company’s own library of images to ethically and legally circumvent the problem of image attribution.
Text-to-image generation doesn’t appear to be available in Bard yet, but was announced at Google I/O 2023 and is set to roll out in the coming weeks.
In addition to generating images, Bard will also include images from Google Search and the Knowledge Graph.
*The original article appeared first with our partner Elektronik-Information.de.