Google is opening limited access to Bard starting this Tuesday. The decision is an important step for the search giant to try to regain ground conquered by ChatGPT and the new Bing in the “ring” of tools powered by artificial intelligence ( AI ).
Check out more details and how to sign up to test the novelty firsthand.
Who can sign up for the Bard waitlist?
- Initially, Bard will only be officially available to select users in the US and UK.
- If you are a subscriber to a VPN service, know that it is also possible to subscribe even in Brazil.
- To join the waitlist, you need to go to bard.google.com, sign in with your Google account and accept the terms of service.
For now, there is still no date for the release of the ChatGPT rival in more countries. Google has already made it clear that it will adopt more caution in launches to avoid new gaffes.
How Bard Works
- The chatbot is based on LaMDA, a powerful AI language model from Google — which has already been embroiled in controversy over the past year.
- Like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s new Bing, Bard gives users a blank text box to ask questions.
- Because of the tendency for AI bots to reliably invent or misinform, Google emphasizes that Bard is not yet a replacement for its default search engine.
- According to information from The Verge, which has already tested Bard, the system generates three responses for each user query.
- Below each answer is a “ Google It ” button, which redirects to a related search on the Google search page.
Two project leads, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins, describe Bard as “an early experiment designed to help people increase their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and feed their curiosity.”
Although the chatbot is connected to Google search results, it still cannot fully answer certain questions. In The Verge‘s tests, for example, Bard got a question about the maximum load capacity of a specific washing machine wrong, giving three incorrect answers.
There are several numbers associated with this query, so sometimes it figures out the context and ‘spits out’ the right answer and other times it goes wrong. It’s one of the reasons why Bard is an early experiment
Eli Collins, one of the Google leaders responsible for Bard
Finally, Google’s chatbot generated responses faster than ChatGPT and Bing (perhaps because it still has fewer users), according to The Verge. However, some features are still missing, like the footnotes that appear in more interactions with the new Bing.
Now, it remains to be seen how the chatbot will perform with more people and also in stress tests, which usually reveal what the capabilities (and limitations) of AI-powered tools are.
