Ahead of the public release of its homegrown Bard AI search tool, Google is inviting users in the US and UK to try it out themselves.
Anyone can join the waitlist to be a tester at bard.google.com, and Google will email you when you have access. It's an "early experiment," Google says in a blog post authored by Sissie Hsiao, product VP, and Eli Collins, research VP. The public beta will focus on improving the tool's accuracy by giving it more data to crunch.
The beta experience sounds more like a choose-your-own-adventure book than a typical search inquiry. "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," Google says. "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."
Google announced Bard in early February—just over two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and one month after Google issued an internal code red on the potential for ChatGPT to change the field of search and overtake Google as top dog. At the time, internal employees were asked to test out Bard, CNBC reports.
Unfortunately, the announcement included a screenshot of Bard inaccurately answering a question about the James Webb Space Telescope. Given the volume of search queries on Google, this stirred up concerns about the company moving too fast to incorporate large language models (LLMs) and misinforming the public.
"While LLMs are an exciting technology, they’re not without their faults," Google says. "For instance, because they learn from a wide range of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, those sometimes show up in their outputs. And they can provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently."
Google's phased testing approach aims to avoid that scenario. In its current form, the company sees Bard as "a complementary experience to Google Search," not a replacement. The beta also offers easy access to the main Google search page to validate answers: just click "Google it."
Google will eventually integrate Bard into its main search function, as Microsoft has done with its Bing-ChatGPT integration "We’ll also be thoughtfully integrating LLMs into Search in a deeper way—more to come," Google says.
For now, the company encourages users to have fun with the tool and see what it can do. "You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity," Google says. "You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post."