Google is set to launch its own AI chatbot, ‘Bard’, in the coming weeks following a final testing stage. The chatbot will be a competitor for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is expected to offer similar natural language processing (NLP) abilities and capabilities.
Sundar Pichia, CEO of Google, made the announcement earlier this month and it has since been met with great anticipation from the tech community. This chatbot will be more advanced than traditional AI chatbots as it uses deep learning models to power its NLP capabilities. Bard is expected to offer users the capability to generate natural-sounding responses in conversations with human beings and other AI agents.
In addition to its conversational capabilities, Bard is also believed to have a range of other features that can help automate various tasks for businesses such as customer service automation and data analysis. This could make interactions with customers faster and more efficient while streamlining processes for businesses. By leveraging the powerful NLP abilities of Bard, businesses can gain insights from customer conversations and use it to refine their offerings.
‘Bard’ has been developed by the same team responsible for Google’s original conversational AI technology, called ReplyAll. As with ReplyAll, we can expect that ‘Bard’ will be capable of understanding natural language and responding in a conversational way. It is likely to include similar features, such as being able to learn from conversations and provide personalised responses.
Bard is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in that its users can input a question in a dialog box, a text answer is given, and the user (it’s currently being tested by Google employees), can give feedback on the response.
Sundar Pichai says “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.” Pichai also highlights his vision for Bard as being “an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity.”
Following OpenAI being seen as first to the mass market with a super-powerful new generation free chatbot (ChatGPT) which already has millions of users, tech commentators are already noting that a chatbot battle has now attracted competitors, with Google’s Bard looking like being next on the scene. Examples of how the competition is hotting-up and of competitors that are currently known about include:
– Google has also announced a $300m investment in a start-up firm called Anthropic, which gives Google a large cloud contract and stake of about 10 per cent in the company. It is understood that the Google/Anthropic collaboration is intended to produce a generative AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT. Anthropic was formed with people who had worked for OpenAI.
– Google is also reported to be working on a project called ‘Atlas,’ also to develop a rival to ChatGPT.
– Facebook/Meta launched its ‘Blenderbot’ AI chatbot in the US last August. At the time, Meta described Blenderbot, built from Meta AI’s publicly available OPT-175B language model, as “a chatbot that can search the internet to talk about nearly any topic”.
The launch of ‘Bard’ is an exciting development for the AI industry and could lead to further advances in natural language processing technology. The ability for chatbots to understand human language more accurately and effectively could revolutionise how we interact with computers, making online interactions much smoother and less frustrating.
It will also be interesting to see how Google’s ‘Bard’ compares with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of features and performance. Ultimately, this competition will help both companies develop better technologies which can benefit users all over the world.
In the blog announcement of the introduction of Bard, Sundar Pichai highlighted how adding the AI chatbot technology to a search engine (Google) could add value and change the format of results. For example, Mr Pichai said: “AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesising insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.”
The public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has meant that the chatbot battle has commenced in earnest as the big tech companies, some of whom already have close working ties (Microsoft) with OpenAI, start to announce the testing and release of their own competing versions, i.e. Google’s Bard and its investment in Anthropic. Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google have realised the need to incorporate AI in their cloud offerings. Both have the cloud computing platforms to handle the size and complexity of the new AI models, and both have exercised their market power and chosen AI specialist partners (OpenAI and Amorphic) to help them to move forward with it quickly. For business users, the introduction of powerful AI chatbots is delivering cost and time savings, creating new business strengths and opportunities, and it will be exciting to see what Bard and other new chatbots can do as they are introduced.
