What is Google Bard? How the AI chatbot works, how to use it, and why it's controversial

Bard is one of the newest artificial intelligence chatbots. The AI chatbot, created by Google, was released in March 2023, after an initial announcement in February. The software was released to a limited amount of users for testing.

The chatbot comes on the heels of the release of one of its major competitors, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has very similar functions to that model.

Here are the answers to some commonly asked questions about the new AI chatbot and how it functions.

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Google Bard is an AI chatbot that creates answers to questions and responses to prompts given by the user. 

Because the AI software is in its initial stages, there isn’t much information available about it on the website. 

On the Google Bard website, you can find a link to join the waitlist for the program and two short quotes about the AI software. One of the quotes describes Bard and what its goal is. 

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"Meet Bard: your creative and helpful collaborator, here to supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity, and bring your ideas to life," the website states. 

There is also a disclaimer that reminds users that this it is in the experimental stages, and the accuracy of Bard’s answers could be flawed. 

"Bard is an experiment and may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses. You can help make Bard better by leaving feedback," the website explains. 

Already since its release, there has been a major controversy in regard to an inaccuracy in one of Bard’s answers. 

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In its short time in user’s hands, Google Bard has already been no stranger to controversy. 

Google released a video on social media showing an example of how Bard works in February.

In the video, Bard is asked "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?" 

Bard then provided a list of three facts, one of which was factually incorrect. 

One of the "facts" provided about the telescope was that it was the first to take a picture of an "exoplanet," which is a planet outside our solar system, according to Dictionary.com. The fact is that the first photos of this nature were taken in 2004 by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which was operated by the European Southern Observatory, according to NASA. 

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After the video went public, Google Bard's parent company, Alphabet, lost a hundred billion dollars in market value in just a single day, according to Search Engine Journal. 

When chatbots get things wrong, these errors are often known as "hallucinations." 

Google Bard is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. The AI "draws information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Google blog post. 

Google Bard uses both public dialogue and web data in order to answer questions, according to Search Engine Journal. 

Since Google Bard is still in the experimental phase, its release has started on a small scale and access has been limited. 

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In order to gain access to Google Bard since its March 2023 release, individuals have been required to join a waitlist through the website.

Based on the information provided on the Google Bard site, there is yet to be an official release and the waitlist is still the only way to gain access to the software.

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The original release that is currently available is a "lightweight" and "smaller" model, Pichai said in the post, as it is for testing purposes and to gain feedback from users. 

In addition to Bard, Google is home to a slew of other AI software. One of these is MusicLM, which was announced by the company In January 2023. MusicLM is an AI tool that takes text descriptions and turns them into music. This tool is still in its experimental phases. 

Other AI services under Google are Vertex AI and Vertex AI Workbench. These are mainly for developers to help them create machine learning models. Several other AI services Google provides for developers in particular are AutoML, Cloud Natural Language, Dialogflow, Media Translation, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Timeseries Insights API, Translation AI, Video AI and Vision AI. 

The Google Cloud site also highlights some tools that can be used for AI Infrastructure such as Deep Learning Containers, Deep Learning VM Image, GPUs, TensorFlow Enterprise and TPUs. 

Google also has AI services businesses can use to help their workflow. One of these is Contact Center AI. This service allows companies to create virtual AI contact centers to assist human agents in call center environments. There is also AI that improves customer experience by helping them shop for products and increasing the quality of Google searches. 

For those who need assistance with AI, Google also provides solutions to those inquiries with its AI Readiness Program. This program helps businesses establish how AI can be incorporated into their business model. 

When Google Bard was first launched, the number of people who had access to it was limited. Launching in March allowed it to be competitive with ChatGPT, while still developing the software in its experimental phases. At its start, it was only available to users in the United States and Britain.