Google's upgraded AI chatbot Bard could change search

The change

Users can draft emails in Bard and export them to Gmail and Google Docs with a new export action. Bard will start playing new source citation annotations next week. It also has a dark theme to make it easier for developers to interact with it, and developers will soon be able to export and run code using the collaborative SaaS browser Replit.

Google also changed Bard from using Google's LamDA language model to the Palm 2 language model. Google says this will help Bard generate and distribute answers in a more efficient way than other Llms, and improve conversations between humans and chatbots.

Separately, Google Search will see a generative AI upgrade that lets users receive conversational responses to specific questions. When a new search generates empirical feature recognition to generate a query that the AI can answer, the first part of the results page will display the AI-generated response.

The cloud and search giant unveiled the new developments at its Google I/O conference this week, which include making Bard available in Japanese and Korean.

Opening up The Bard to the world is a big step, says Daniel Newman, analyst for Future Research.

"They kind of said, 'Yeah, we were caught off guard early; our initial debit was a bit of a mess. But we feel like we're on track,'" he said, referring to Bard's early problems, especially in 2 In the first public demonstration on 2nd. 6, where it made a major factual error.

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Integrate Bard into its business model

But by not integrating Bard into search, Google is still in the early stages of assessing how Bard can fit into its larger business model, which the company relies heavily on by selling ads on its free-to-user search site. to commercialize search.

"I would definitely view the Bard itself now as more of a technology demo and demonstration than a real product or commercial device service," said Forrester analyst Rowan Curran.

While it's interesting that Google has built more integrations with third-party capabilities, similar to some of the plugins OpenAI offers, questions remain over whether Bard will become an actual commercial product, Curran said.

Additionally, it may be optional for Google to turn Bard into a commercial service. Meanwhile, Google remains strongly focused on "traditional" search and its Google Cloud Platform, the third-ranked public cloud behind AWS and Microsoft.

They kind of said, 'Yeah, we were caught off guard early on; our initial debit was a bit of a mess. But we feel like we're on the right track. '

"What they want to see is that people will see the new Google search experience as a more intuitive, more interactive, more natural way to get information," Curran said.

So instead of adding the chat experience to search as Microsoft did to Bing, Google just enhanced its overall search experience with more options and features.

"What they're doing is adding more tools for people running these searches to get at the information contained in those searches," Curran added.

Google's choice not to include Bard directly in search is also a way of protecting itself, he said.

"Google has a lot to lose besides Bard being bad," Curran said. He believes that if Microsoft's effort to include ChatGPT in its Bing search engine ultimately fails, the fallout won't be as bad for the tech giant as it would be for Google, whose biggest moneymaker is its search engine.

"It makes sense for Google to take a more measured approach to how it wants to integrate this technology," Curran said.

However, Newman said Bard and Search may be separated for a while. "It's part of the development phase."

Google will likely remain focused on figuring out the costs associated with opening Bard to everyone before it can focus on fully integrating Search and Bard, he said. Additionally, Google may still be evaluating the costs associated with compute utilization and how Bard will run on different models.

Also, Newman said, the more AI-generating capabilities Google adds to its search engine, the more important challenges it will have to monetize search. The more information available from a chatbot, the less the need for a user to visit a website linked through a search. This can significantly reduce income.

"As generative AI starts to come into [search], all the clicks that it could reduce are dollars, and if they don't come up with a new monetization workflow, that could be threatened," he said.

Esther Ajao is a news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems.