How Good Is Bard And Should You Use It?
Explaining My Experience With Google’s AI Chatbot “Bard”
The release of ChatGPT got us all excited about the future of AI, we all knew that other companies were going to compete with ChatGPT and Google was no exception.
Google recently released its own AI chatbot by the name of Bard. You can call it Google’s version of ChatGPT which uses natural human language to take/understand prompts and give human-conversational answers.
I recently got my hands on Bard and used it for a while. I’ve shared my experience in this post.
What is Bard?
Bard is a chatbot from Google that uses Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Application (LaMDA) and machine learning to understand large data sets of text and give easy-to-understand answers.
If you are familiar with ChatGPT, Bard is like ChatGPT — Made by Google. It gives answers to complex questions, writes for you, gives you tips, etc. It is still under development so you might run into a few flaws while using Bard.
Note: As I said, Bard is still under development and hasn’t been rolled out for the public to use. In order to use Bard, you’ll have to go to its website and join the waitlist. If you sign up, you’ll receive an e-mail from Google when it’s your turn to try Bard for yourself.
Using Bard
Here’s Bard’s interface
It’s simple, clean, and easy on the eyes. Much like ChatGPT, it has a text field for you to enter a prompt to start using it.
On the left side, you’ll see some options like Bard Activity, FAQ, Updates, and Help & Support.
Since it doesn’t provide you with a chat history, as ChatGPT does by having all your previous conversations with it in the left panel, you can access your previous prompts through Bard Activity. And I think you know about the rest of the options.
One more thing you’ll notice when you start using Bard is that it doesn’t type out the text like ChatGPT. It gives you the output straight up after thinking.
You can see there are some options near the end of the answer given by Bard. It includes a Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Regenerate, and Google It option. Yes, Bard allows you to Google Search your prompt right from its interface.
On the right side, when you click on the three dots, Bard allows you to copy, or report the answer if you are not happy with it.
Now comes my personal favorite feature of Bard. If you look near the top right corner of the answer, you’ll see an option by the name “View other drafts”. What this does is it gives you two more versions of the answer that are somewhat different from each other. It means that Bard doesn’t generate one answer to a prompt, it generates THREE.
Here’s another interesting thing about Bard, it allows you to edit your current prompt without the need to write a new one. You can do that by clicking on the Pencil icon at the end of the prompt line
Just click on it, edit your prompt, click Update and it’ll generate a new answer for you.
Bard vs ChatGPT: Which one is better?
It all comes down to this question, should I use Bard or ChatGPT, if you ask me I personally prefer ChatGPT over Bard at this time and I’ve got my reasons.
- There’s no waitlist for ChatGPT, you can just sign-up and start using it anytime you want.
- Bard is still in the stages of development so it's lacking a lot of the functionality that ChatGPT is already able to perform, like having a chat history.
- ChatGPT is also much better at creative writing than Bard, it can write much better poems/stories in many more creative ways than Bard.
Bard is also better than ChatGPT in some cases, one of them being that Bard has access to real-time data through Google Search so you are better off relying on Bard for up-to-date information than ChatGPT, which can only access data up until 2021.
You should also know that Bard is constantly being improved by Google through regular updates. Bard wasn’t able to code until recently, after an update rolled out by Google on 21st April 2023. Bard is now able to write code in over 20 programming languages.
Comparing Bard with ChatGPT right now would be unfair in my opinion as Bard isn’t fully developed yet and ChatGPT has been in development for multiple years. Once Google rolls out the finished, polished version of Bard to the public, then comparing the two would be the real battle.
In the meantime, we are being provided with useful tools to increase our productivity day by day and we should take full advantage of them. Getting familiar with these tools and using them in creative ways would be the smartest decision.
Any questions pop in your mind? Feel free to ask in the comments, I will be happy to clear your doubts.
