Google has announced that it is making its AI-powered chatbot, Bard, available for testing in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The move comes as Google seeks to catch up with competitors like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT. Bard, along with similar apps, can create essays, poems, or computing code on command, although it comes with a warning that the information generated may be inaccurate or inappropriate. Interested users can sign up on a waiting list on Google Bard’s website to test the chatbot.
According to a blog post by Google’s Vice Presidents, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins, the company is looking for feedback from more people to improve Bard’s language prediction capabilities.
They cautioned that chatbots can have real-world biases, stereotypes, or inaccuracies in their responses. Despite this, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the move an “early experiment” in allowing people to collaborate with generative artificial intelligence.
The announcement follows Microsoft’s aggressive rollout of generative AI technology through its investment in OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
OpenAI recently released an update of its AI technology, which it claimed would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor. ChatGPT is available to the general public through OpenAI’s paid subscription plan and an AI-powered version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine.