Google recently announced Bard, an artificial intelligence feature that would compete with ChatGPT. This new Google AI chatbot feature would be included in the search function of the engine to compete with the popular AI tool. 

Google Bard 

Google Bard is supposed to be an AI search assistant and work in the background of user search queries. Then, it would generate a short summary of the results that users generally receive, instead of having them look at a list of websites. According to the chief executive Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, the company behind Google, the AI feature would help Google get to the core of what users are searching for on the engine. The goal of the AI-powered feature would be to boil down any complex information into a format that’s easy for people to digest. That way, Google users could have a faster time learning about the bigger picture and choose if they wanted to explore it more. According to Google, Bard would first launch with a group of testers, and then to the rest of the public once it’s ready. 

How it Works 

The way that the Google AI chatbot would work is by scanning the internet and then learning all words, ideas, and phrases associated with a search term. Once the tool gets completely trained and learns all the information with the help of AI experts, it would be deployed for testing. The company shared some screenshots to show how the tool would work in practice. Google’s users get to type in complete sentences or questions in the search bar. Then, they would get full sentences in response to their query. When a user types in a question, the search engine will generate a summary text of the most recent news or information about the question. This new feature from Google is based on a pre-existing product called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA is a type of a large language model (LMM), a software algorithm that’s trained on vast amounts of data. This type of software is mostly used to power chatbots, but it’s been used to do other things too. 

Implications 

Both OpenAI and its ChatGPT and Google with Bard are creating their own bots to provide users with digestible information. One of the biggest challenges that ChatGPT has faced so far is that the information isn’t up to date. Another one is the fact that it’s relatively easy for users to get completely false information from such chatbots. That means Google will have to mitigate these types of weaknesses with Bard. The first one might already have a solution as Bard will get access to all up-to-date information to provide users with current details. This all means more people will start relying on AI chatbots to learn about various topics, and other companies will have to figure out ways to keep up with that change. 

Mike Paffmann is CEO of Virgo PR, a leading PR firm.