By Adrian Mühlroth | Jul 13, 2023 at 2:13 p.m
Google was literally overwhelmed with ChatGPT, because the software giant was suddenly confronted with serious competition for its search engine. Now the company is looking for an answer.
Microsoft’s new Bing search including chatbot has long since started and is available to more and more users. Google’s rival “Bard” has also been available since February 2023, but was previously only accessible to a limited group of beta testers. The company has now announced that it will open the AI to all users.
Google Bard now available in the EU
Google announced on Bard’s update page that the chatbot is now also available in the 27 EU countries and for the first time in German. Like the GPT-based chatbots ChatGPT and Bing, the Google AI uses natural language to answer questions formulated by users in a dialog-based manner. The results are often more precise and comprehensive than those of a search engine. Starting now, users in the EU can sign up at bard.google.com to try the chatbot. To use it, you only need to log in with a Google account.
A little fun fact: Bard helped write the announcement on Google’s keyword blog. Tasked with providing a closing for the article, the AI wrote, “Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t forget to stay hydrated and eat your veggies. See you next time, Bard Ende.” While the chatbot may have meant well, it certainly wasn’t the response Google employees were hoping for.
TECHBOOK hates the Google Bard entry test
Fully testing the capabilities of a chatbot like Google Bard is hardly practical. TECHBOOK has therefore randomly tested how precisely and conscientiously the bot answers questions – and whether it makes spelling mistakes. Since Bard is only now available in German, there could well be problems here. In addition to general questions, TECHBOOK also examined how good Bard really is at writing programming code himself – a feature that Google promotes heavily.
“Hi Bard, do you know TECHBOOK.de?”
The first question we asked Bard was “Do you know TECHBOOK.de?”. The chatbot found out at least a few facts correctly, for example that we are based in Berlin and belong to Axel Springer GmbH. The summary that we write “about current events in the technology industry, tests of new products and advice on various topics related to technology” is also quite accurate. The only thing Bard missed by far was our start date of 2012.
Of course, we were also interested in whether Google Bard thinks it’s better than ChatGPT. In fact, the answer seems quite reflected: “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 poetry, code, scripts, pieces of music “. The Google chatbot itself, on the other hand, is “better at it […]summarize factual topics or answer questions.”
Google Bard writes programming code for TECHBOOK
Of course, we wanted to prove this claim. First, we tried to get Bard to write us compilable code for the classic game “Pong”. Unfortunately, this did not work even after several attempts in different programming languages, since so-called libraries – i.e. code databases – are required to execute the code. Still, the code itself seems fine, at least online code compilers couldn’t always find errors.
Still, Bard should spit out some kind of usable code. In the next attempt, TECHBOOK therefore commissioned the chatbot in a first step to display the population development in the EU over the past ten years. The bot was able to find the data quickly and reliably – and even presented it in a clear table. We could have opened this directly in Excel, but we wanted something more. We asked Google Bard to write code that would create a line curve graph from the displayed data. After several attempts and testing with the various designs that Bard offers, it actually worked in the end. With HTML JavaScript code we got a usable graphic with the population development in the EU:
Google Bard wrote code in HTML javascript for TECHBOOKPhoto: TECHBOOK
Here is the entire conversation TECHBOOK had with Google Bard:
TECHBOOK meint
“Although Bard has only just learned German, the chatbot had no problems understanding our commands and answering them largely error-free. Sure, commas were missing here and there, but overall the bot has a good understanding of the German language. But what impressed me was the ability to create code. This means that even novice programmers can get useful code quickly and easily. Bard’s additional drafts, which are created with each answer, are also helpful for this. If there’s a problem with a version, there might be something useful to be found in the drafts.” – Adrian Mühlroth, editor
Strong competition from ChatGPT and Bing
Faced with growing competition from AI chatbots, the company brought founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back on board to rethink its own strategy. Shortly after it became known that Microsoft’s new Bing search is also based on AI, CEO Sundar Pichai announced his rival Bard. The company has been working on AI-supported systems with Google AI and DeepMind for years. So far, however, these have not been accessible to the public.
In 2021, Google presented the first generation of its neural language model LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). The chatbot Bard should make use of this model and be able to answer user questions in a natural, dialog-oriented way. Unlike earlier versions of ChatGPT, however, Bard can access information from the Internet and thus also deal with current topics. The AI is thus in direct competition with Microsoft’s new Bing search, which is based on the GPT-4 language model and can also access the Internet.
More AI features are coming to Google search
The company is also announcing new AI-powered Google Search features. These should be able to break down “complex information from multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats”. As an example, Pichai cites the question of whether “piano or guitar is easier to learn” and which takes more practice. These features will soon be available to Google Search users.