These Are the Biggest Differences Between Google Bard and ChatGPT

AI chatbots are more popular than ever, and there are plenty of solid options out there to choose from beyond OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One particularly strong competitor is Google’s Bard AI, which pulls information from the internet and runs off the latest Gemini language model created by Google.

What is Google Bard?

Bard is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It’s an AI chatbot designed to respond to various queries and tasks, all while offering the latest AI language model to work off of. Like most other chatbots, including ChatGPT, Bard can answer math problems, help with writing articles and documents, and most other tasks you expect a generative AI bot to accomplish.

How does Bard work?

Much like ChatGPT, Bard is powered by a large language model (LLM) and is designed to respond with reasonable and human-like answers to your queries and requests. Previously, Bard used Google’s PaLM 2 language model, but Google has since released an update that adds in Gemini Pro, the search giant’s most complex and capable language model yet. Running Bard with two different language models has allowed Google to see the bot in action in several different ways. Bard can be accessed on any device by visiting the chatbot’s website, just like ChatGPT.

Who can access Google Bard?

Bard is currently available to the general public via an experimental beta. Google is still hard at work on the AI chatbot and hopes to continue improving it. As such, any responses, queries, or tasks submitted to Bard will be reviewed by Google engineers to help the AI learn more from the questions that you’re asking.

To start using Bard, simply head over to bard.google.com and sign in.

What languages does Bard support?

Bard currently supports over 40 languages. Google hasn’t said yet if it plans to add more language support to the chatbot, but a Google support doc notes that it currently it supports: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified / Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

What features does Bard offer?

Like ChatGPT, Bard can answer basic questions, help with coding, and solve complex mathematic equations. Additionally, Google added support for multimodal search in July, allowing users to input pictures as well as text into the chatbot. This, along with the other capabilities of the chatbot, allow the bot to complete reverse image searches. Google can also include images in its answers, which are pulled from the search giant’s online results.

Is Bard connected to the internet?

Yes, Google Bard is connected to the internet. The chatbot has actually had internet access more widely available than ChatGPT, meaning that the model is trained on the latest and most up-to-date information found on the internet. This is obviously a nice advantage over ChatGPT, which just added full access to the internet in recent months, but it also introduces some possible room for misinformation.

How accurate is Google Bard?

Now that Bard is using Gemini Pro, it’s expected to be one of the most accurate chatbots available on the web right now. However, past experiences with Bard have shown that the bot is likely to hallucinate or take credit for information that it found via Google searches. This is a problem that Google has been working hard to fix, and it has managed to improve the results and how they are handled exceptionally well over the past few months. However, like any chatbot, Bard is still capable of creating information that is untrue or plagiarized. As such, it is always recommended you double check any information that chatbots like Bard provide, to ensure it is original and accurate.

Is Bard free to use?

Bard is currently free to use and Google has not shared any plans to charge for the chatbot just yet. However, it did announce an advanced Bard option, which will utilize the strongest and most capable version of its Gemini language model, Gemini Ultra. That feature isn’t set to arrive until sometime in 2024, though, and Google will likely charge for it.

How does Bard compare to ChatGPT?

Bard is a solid competitor for ChatGPT, especially now that Gemini should bring results more akin to GPT-4 into the chatbot. The interface is very similar, and the functionality offered by both chatbots should handle most of the queries and tasks that you throw at either of them. Google’s current lack of any paid plans also make Bard an accessible option, and you get the most up-to-date information thanks to Bard’s internet access. To connect ChatGPT to the internet right now, you’d either need to utilize Copilot, which uses GPT-4 with Bing search, or subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, new subscriptions for ChatGPT Plus are currently closed.

Google did share some information about how Gemini compares to GPT-4V, one of the latest versions of GPT-4, and it actually achieves more accurate results in several fields. However, it’s hard to say exactly which one is better, as they both have their strengths. Ultimately, I’d recommend trying to complete whatever task you want to accomplish in both, and then seeing which one works best for your needs.

Google is also working on other AI-driven systems, which it could possibly include in Bard’s working systems later down the line. For now, though, the company is keeping some of its more extreme developments, like MusicLM, which uses AI to generate music, to itself.

Lead Image Credit: Google