What Is Google Bard? (Definition, How Does Bard Work?) Everything You Need To Know

Everything you need to know about Google’s AI Chatbot. Google Bard, Following the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google released its own AI chatbot, Bard. Now that its waitlist is available, here is what you need to know. Bard is Google’s experimental, conversational, AI chat service. It is meant to function similarly to ChatGPT, with the biggest difference being that Google’s service will pull its information from the web.

Google Bard is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service that promises to rival the popularity of ChatGPT. While introducing Bard, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai called it an “experimental conversational AI service” that will boost Google Search when launched globally. A small group of trusted users is currently trying out the chatbot before it’s rolled out to the broader public.

What Is It?

Like ChatGPT, you will be able to converse with Google Bard in complete sentences and ask factual and subtle questions. Its connection to Google Search should help provide the freshest and latest information. This timeliness of results is a distinction that will make it stand apart from ChatGPT.

For instance, Google says you can ask Bard to:

• Plan a friend’s baby shower
• Compare two Oscar-nominated movies
• Get lunch ideas based on what’s in your fridge

Bard will simplify these complex answers and give you practical suggestions to apply.

Not all responses will be mere factual answers. Google wants to meet the expectations of searchers by offering deeper insights and in simpler words that can be understood by a nine-year-old.

Unless Google Bard is released worldwide, it’s difficult to estimate its capabilities. Most of our current knowledge comes from Google’s The Keyword blog post where the chatbot was announced. For users on the Google Search page, Bard is expected to follow the same conversational approach as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Bing’s AI search. Additionally, it will draw on Google’s huge search engine index while it uses artificial intelligence to synthesize fresh responses to any question.

Who can use Google Bard?

Users must be 18 or older and have a personal Google account. Currently, Bard is only available in the United States and United Kingdom and will eventually expand to other countries.

Who Built Google Bard?

Google Bard is based on Google’s longstanding work on language models since it open-sourced its first Transformer neural network architecture in 2017. Language models are AI and machine learning applications that synthesize vast amounts of text and predict the next words which help them carry out an open-ended exchange with the user. AI chatbots like Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing AI differ in the language models they use in the background and how they use it.

LaMDA (Language Model Dialogue Application) is the system that powers Google Bard. In these early versions, Bard will use a lightweight model version of LaMDA which will need less computing power, thus helping Google to scale to more devices and users. Google promises to work out any kinks so that AI answers meet its standards for “quality, safety, and groundedness.”

As Bard evolves, so will the artificial intelligence tools that will run Google Search in the future.

How Does Bard Impact Me?

You will be able to ask Google Bard real-time questions. But unlike traditional keyword searches, your questions can also be complex and nuanced.

Bard is powered by a “lightweight” version of LaMDA.

LaMDA is a large language model that is trained on datasets consisting of public dialogue and web data.

There are two important factors related to the training described in the associated research paper, which you can download as a PDF here: LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications (read the abstract here).

• A. Safety: The model achieves a level of safety by tuning it with data that was annotated by crowd workers.
• B. Groundedness: LaMDA grounds itself factually with external knowledge sources (through information retrieval, which is search).

The LaMDA research paper states:

“…factual grounding, involves enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a language translator, and a calculator.

We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that our approach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responses that merely sound plausible.”

Google used three metrics to evaluate the LaMDA outputs:

1. Sensibleness: A measurement of whether an answer makes sense or not.
2. Specificity: Measures if the answer is the opposite of generic/vague or contextually specific.
3. Interestingness: This metric measures if LaMDA’s answers are insightful or inspire curiosity.

All three metrics were judged by crowdsourced raters, and that data was fed back into the machine to keep improving it.

The LaMDA research paper concludes by stating that crowdsourced reviews and the system’s ability to fact-check with a search engine were useful techniques.

Google’s researchers wrote:

“We find that crowd-annotated data is an effective tool for driving significant additional gains.

We also find that calling external APIs (such as an information retrieval system) offers a path towards significantly improving groundedness, which we define as the extent to which a generated response contains claims that can be referenced and checked against a known source.”

Google Bard will change your old search habits and the entire nature of online search. It will be integrated into every Google product like Android, Google Drive, and Google Maps. For instance, you can not only use it for a factual search (“How many keys does a piano have?”) but also to understand deeper questions like, “Is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?”

The Bard will help you manage information overload by providing the big picture and the option to dive deeper into the topic. As it will be integrated into other Google products, you can expect Bard to help you find the best function in a Google Sheet or design quick Google Slides around content.

How Can I Try Google Bard?

Google Bard is only accessible to a small group of trusted beta testers. So, you will have to wait until this small group turns into a wider pool, or the AI is integrated into Google search on our devices. But thanks to the overheated competition, the launch is expected sooner than later.

Is Bard free?

As of this writing, Google has given no indication that it will charge for use. Google has no history of charging customers for services — its cloud business notwithstanding. The current assumption that Bard will be integrated into Google’s basic search engine indicates that it will be freely available for use.