ChatGPT rival Google Bard launched in India: how to use, is it free, what’s new?

On Wednesday, Google hosted I/O 2023, its annual developer conference. The company showcased the latest generation of its hardware technologies, as well as how Android 14 will look like. More interest, however, was on the company’s potential artificial intelligence (AI) announcements, and Google did not disappoint. Up on stage, Google and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai, along with top executives from Google Cloud, DeepMind, Research and other divisions, unveiled the latest generation of Google Bard, powered by Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2 — its latest generation large language model (LLM). The company also confirmed that going forward, Bard will be available in India, alongside 179 other nations.

On this note, here’s looking at what Google Bard is, how it differs from its original version released earlier this year, how it can rival the popular ChatGPT and OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM, and how much could it cost.

Google Bard: what is it and what’s new?

Straight off the bat, the new version of Google Bard remains the same as before — i.e., it is a chatbot that is powered by AI to deliver human-like responses to human-like queries. The objective and logic behind the chatbot remains the same, and it offers an experience that is similar to what has been popularised by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The latter brought the conversational chatbot to the masses by showcasing a bot that can generate natural language text to mimic human nuances. Bard is Google’s interpretation of such a chatbot interface, which going forward is being integrated into Google’s Workspace tools such as Gmail, Docs and Sheets. Doing so will give business users access to Bard within these Google services, which in turn will help generate a body of text while writing an email, or other similar tasks.

According to Google, Bard is now based on its latest LLM, called PaLM 2. The latter is trained on a “significantly larger” number of parameters over the 540 billion data points that the first generation of PaLM was based on. In simpler terms, the new version of PaLM will give Bard the ability to understand over 100 languages, and also understand images in user queries. It will also have more context and ability to understand riddles and idioms, as well as scientific equations. Finally, the new version of Bard will also be able to write code in popular languages such as Python, JavaScript and Fortran, in order to rival tools such as ChatGPT itself, or GitHub’s Copilot, in assisting code-writing for developers.

How to use Google Bard in India?

Bard, to be sure, is now available (albeit only in the English language) in India, and 179 other nations. Using Bard is fairly simple, and you can do so right away. To get access, use the following steps:

• Click here, or access bard.google.com
• On the webpage that opens, you will first be prompted to sign in to a Google account, if you are not signed in already through your browser
• Follow the on-screen instructions to sign-in to Bard
• Once you are signed in, you’ll find a prompt called ‘Try now’
• The Bard interface will open once you click on it, giving you unlimited access to the chatbot

Google Bard vs ChatGPT

GPT-4, according to a Mint report, is based on 3 trillion parameters of data. Although Google has not disclosed the size of dataset that PaLM 2, the tech behind Bard, is trained upon, it is likely comparable.

What is important to note is that with the latest updates of GPT-4 and PaLM-2, ChatGPT Plus and Bard are now essentially similar on paper. Both the chatbots are based on LLMs that have been trained on multiple languages around the world, and both can accept images as part of user queries in order to produce text responses.

However, it remains to be seen how real-world responses are vetted on either platforms. On 91mobiles’ initial usage experience, Bard could be easily manipulated into labelling one particular news website to be both good and bad — without really differentiating context between the two. The same can be more difficult with the present version of ChatGPT Plus — although the free version of ChatGPT, which is still based on GPT-3.5, can be manipulated in similar ways.

Google Bard is free as of now

At present, Bard remains free for every users in the countries where it is available. Google has not announced a paid usage tier of Bard, although enterprise users (business that pay for Google’s services) will get access to Bard on Gmail, Docs and Sheets within their Workspace.

In comparison, ChatGPT has a free tier based on the older LLM that remains free for all to access, and a paid tier under ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 (approx. Rs 1,600) per month as a subscription-only service.

The post Google-made ChatGPT rival Bard launched in India: how to use, is it free, what’s new? first appeared on 91mobiles.com.

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