July 13, 2023, 12:13 pm | Read time: 5 minutes
With ChatGPT, Google was practically overrun, as the software giant suddenly faced serious competition for its search engine. Now the company is looking for an answer.
Microsoft’s new Bing search with chatbot has long been launched and is available to more and more users. Google’s rival “Bard” has also been available since February 2023, but was previously accessible only to a limited group of beta testers. Now the company has announced that the AI will be open to all users.
Google Bard Now Available in the EU
Google announced on Bard’s update page that the chatbot is now available in the 27 EU countries and for the first time in German. Like the GPT-based chatbots ChatGPT and Bing, Google’s AI uses natural language to answer user-formulated questions in a dialog-based manner. The results are often more precise and comprehensive than those of a search engine. Users in the EU can now sign up at bard.google.com to try out the chatbot. All that’s needed is a Google account to sign in.
Here’s a fun fact: Bard helped write the announcement on Google’s Keyword blog. Tasked with providing a closing remark for the article, the AI wrote: “Thanks for reading, and as always, don’t forget to drink enough water and eat your vegetables. Until next time, Bard out.” While the chatbot likely meant well, it probably wasn’t the response the Google employees were hoping for.
Read also: What Google would have looked like in the 1980s
TECHBOOK Tested Google Bard
Fully testing the capabilities of a chatbot like Google Bard is hardly practical. TECHBOOK therefore conducted spot checks to see how precisely and diligently the bot answers questions–and whether it makes any spelling errors. Since Bard is now available in German, there could be some issues. Besides general questions, TECHBOOK also examined how well Bard can actually write programming code–a feature Google heavily promotes.
“Hi Bard, do you know TECHBOOK.de?”
The first question we asked Bard was “Do you know TECHBOOK.de?” The chatbot got some facts right, such as that we are based in Berlin and belong to Axel Springer GmbH. The summary that we “write about current events in the tech industry, test new products, and provide guides on various tech-related topics” is fairly accurate. However, Bard missed our start date by a wide margin, stating it as 2012.
Of course, we were also interested in whether Google Bard thinks it is better than ChatGPT. The answer seems quite reflective: “ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained transformer model, while I am a factual language model.” According to Bard, this means that ChatGPT “is better at generating creative text, like poems, codes, scripts, music pieces.” The Google chatbot itself, on the other hand, “is better at summarizing factual topics or answering questions.”
Google Bard Writes Programming Code for TECHBOOK
We naturally wanted to put this claim to the test. First, we tried to get Bard to program compilable code for the classic game “Pong.” Unfortunately, this didn’t work even after several attempts in different programming languages, as libraries–code databases–are necessary to execute the code. Nevertheless, the code itself seems to be fine, as online code compilers couldn’t always find errors.
Still, Bard should produce some form of usable code. In the next attempt, TECHBOOK tasked the chatbot with displaying the population development in the EU over the past ten years. The bot was able to quickly and reliably gather the data–and even presented it in a clear table. We could have opened this directly in Excel, but we wanted a bit more. We asked Google Bard to write code that creates a line graph from the displayed data. After several attempts and testing with the various drafts Bard offered, it finally worked. With HTML-JavaScript code, we got a usable graph of the population development in the EU:
Here you can find the entire conversation TECHBOOK had with Google Bard: https://g.co/bard/share/43b7b7d6a59e.
Strong Competition from ChatGPT and Bing
Due to the growing competition from AI chatbots, the company brought back founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to rethink its strategy. Shortly after it became known that Microsoft’s new Bing search also relies on AI, CEO Sundar Pichai announced their rival Bard. The company has been working with Google AI and DeepMind on AI-supported systems for years. However, these were not previously accessible to the public.
In 2021, Google introduced the first generation of its neural language model LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). The chatbot Bard is supposed to use this model to answer user questions in a natural, dialogue-oriented manner. Unlike earlier versions of ChatGPT, Bard can access information from the internet and thus also address current topics. This puts the AI in direct competition with Microsoft’s new Bing search, which is based on the GPT-4 language model and can also access the internet.
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More AI Features Coming to Google Search
The company also announced new AI-supported features for Google Search. These are intended to “break down complex information from multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.” Pichai cites the question of whether “piano or guitar is easier to learn” and what requires more practice as an example. These features will soon be available to Google Search users.
Sources
- Bard: “Experiment updates” (accessed July 13, 2023)
- The Keyword: “An important next step on our AI journey” (accessed February 7, 2023)
- The Keyword: “Try Bard and share your feedback” (accessed March 22, 2023)