Everything you wanted to know about the Google AI Chatbot Bard in 10 brief points

With Microsoft-backed OpenAI ChatGPT making the headlines in the last few weeks, Google has unveiled its very own AI chatbot called Google Bard on February 6. The artificial intelligence journey started in 1951 with the world’s first AI powered checkers-playing program written by Christopher Strachey. Over the last few months, the trend has simply skyrocketted especially after OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT gained over 100 million users within just two months of release. This forced Google to unveil its own answer to ChatGPT in the form of Google Bard.

What is Google Bard, how does it work and what are its benefits?

1. Google Bard is based on the company’s next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA).

2. Bard is designed as an interface to a Large Language Model (LLM) that enables users to collaborate with generative AI. Google’s AI chatbot features next-generation language and conversation capabilities.

3. It is the result of Google’s research in LLM which started with the introduction of a neural conversational model in 2015, followed by Google’s Transformers project in 2017.

4. Google Bard is capable of generating a variety of responses, even from the same or similar prompts and questions. If a user would like to see a different response or set of responses, they can ask Bard to generate a new response.

5. Bard can be a jumping off point for users’ curiosity as they explore ideas or topics of interest. For instance, Bard can explain a complex concept simply or surface relevant insights on a topic, which might inspire a user to explore and learn more.

6. How does it work? Once a user provides a prompt, Bard uses the context in the prompt and the interaction with the user to draft several versions of a response. Bard then classifies and checks its responses against predetermined safety parameters.

7. Responses that pass through these technical guardrails are then re-ranked based on quality, with the higher-quality response, or responses, provided back to the user.

8. To prevent Bard from responding to prompts it’s not yet trained to address or outputting harmful or offensive content, Google put in place a set of technical guardrails. The goal of these guardrails is to prevent problematic responses.

9. Unlike Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard is not available for public access yet.

10. Although Google Bard is only available through waitlists in select countries, CEO Sundar Pichai has revealed that it will be made available to the public in the near future and an API version will also be created for businesses.