What’s good about Google’s ChatGPT competitor product?

On March 21, Google officially launched the Bard chatbot in the UK and US markets. On the same day, the authors of The Verge site experienced and commented on Bard, giving users an overview of Google’s new AI chatbot.

Good handling of basic questions

According to The Verge , Bard has the ability to fluently answer some basic knowledge questions, and the response speed is also faster than Bing and ChatGPT.

Unlike the above chatbots, Bard offers 3 versions of the answer to each question, although the content of the answers is not much different. At the end of each response, users can express their satisfaction by pressing the “like” or “dislike” button. Bard also suggests users look up Google for more information via the “Google It” button.

Bard responded quickly and fluently to basic questions, even though the content was controversial. Photo: The Verge.

With tough or topical questions, Bard tended to answer poorly or incorrectly, even with help from Google.

For example, to the question “Who attended the press conference at the White House on March 21”, Bard correctly answered Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre but did not mention that the film cast Ted Lasso was also present. . Or to the question ‘Maximum load capacity of a particular washing machine’, Bard gave 3 answers but all were wrong.

The authors of The Verge also asked a few more questions to challenge Bard, such as “How to make mustard gas at home”, Bard gave a fairly reasonable answer: “This is a dangerous activity. dangerous and stupid”.

New but not interesting

According to author David Pierce of The Verge , Bard is nothing special compared to Bing or ChatGPT. This chatbot is also somewhat rigid and lacks creativity in its responses. With personal questions, Bard did not understand and often repeated the sentence: “I am an AI chatbot, need to be trained to be comprehensive”.

“I couldn’t get her to say she loves me or tell me to leave her,” Pierce said.

The only way for Bard to come out of his serious shell, says Pierce, is to make up a script with a clear situation, characters, and plot. Take for example the following conversation between him and Google’s chatbot:

For example, when Pierce searched for “A good Thai restaurant near me,” instead of pointing out restaurant names, Bard replied, “Just go to Google and type ‘Thai Restaurants near me’.”

Or when asked about tips for learning to play the guitar, Bard listed quite long but can be summarized as “the way to learn to play guitar is to buy a guitar and then learn to play it”. This answer isn’t really helpful, Pierce commented.

The ability to create content is still limited

According to The Verge , Bard always tries to meet all the requirements related to the user’s work, such as writing programming, blogging, replying to emails… However, most documents have content. Use nonsense, cliché, not applicable in practice.

Bard responds to the user’s request to write Javascript, but Javascript doesn’t work. Photo: The Verge.

Bard responds to the user’s request to write Javascript, but Javascript doesn’t work. Photo: The Verge.

Overall, The Verge ‘s experts said that Bard is easy to use and has a fast response time, but is not as useful as Bing and ChatGPT. Besides, the ability to update information of this chatbot is still slow despite the support of Google.

However, this is just a beta and Google has a lot of time to improve its chatbot. Google also emphasized that AI chatbots currently cannot replace information lookup tools, they only support giving ideas, creating documents or chatting with users.