A few weeks after revealing its experimental conversational AI service Bard, Google is ready to let everybody take it for a spin. On Tuesday, Google announced it was opening access to Bard in the US and the UK. Much like Microsoft’s new Bing, users can join a waitlist and will receive an email when Google grants them access to Bard. If you want to try Bard, head to bard.google.com, hit the “Join waitlist” button, and sign in with your Google account.
Join the Google Bard waitlist today
As Google VPs Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins explained in a blog post on Tuesday, Bard is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of Google’s large language model LaMDA. In time, Google will update Bard with “newer, more capable models.”
Google also acknowledges that conversational AI is not always right. No matter how confident the chatbot sounds, there’s a chance that the information it presents will be false or misleading, as we saw in the first demo of Bard that Google shared on Twitter.
“Although it’s important to be aware of challenges like these, there are still incredible benefits to LLMs, like jumpstarting human productivity, creativity and curiosity,” Google says. “And so, when using Bard, you’ll often get the choice of a few different drafts of its response so you can pick the best starting point for you. You can continue to collaborate with Bard from there, asking follow-up questions. And if you want to see an alternative, you can always have Bard try again.”
For now, Bard will exist separately from Google Search, unlike Microsoft’s direct integration of its chatbot into Bing search. After you receive a response from Bard, you can click on “Google it” to open Search in a new tab to find relevant results or fact-check Bard.
Google says that access to Bard is rolling out in the US and the UK starting today, but access will expand to more countries and languages over time.
