Google has made artificial intelligence a core part of its identity — at I/O 2017 six years ago, CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company was transitioning to an AI-first approach, and groundbreaking technologies from DeepMind have since backed up that claim. But the competition has started to catch up, most notably with OpenAI's ChatGPT offering more conversational and thorough answers than a Knowledge Graph Card could ever hope to provide. Today, Google has taken its first major steps towards bringing Search into the new era of AI by opening up access to its conversational Bard chatbot.

Bard is being opened up to “trusted testers” today, and Google expects to make the tool available more widely to the public in the coming weeks. The chatbot pulls information from the internet in much the same way as Google Search, except it uses natural language processing from Google’s LaMDA in an attempt to directly answer questions rather than simply listing results. This is eerily similar to Microsoft's recent announcement that Bing will soon use ChatGPT to make its search results more conversational.

A brief demonstration of Bard’s potential in Google Search

LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, made headlines when a Google engineer speculated that the AI was sentient — the company denied this claim and has since parted ways with the employee, but chief executive Sundar Pichai has nonetheless spoken highly of the chatbot’s capabilities, claiming it can keep a conversation going “no matter what we talk about.” The initial release of Bard will be using a slimmed-down version of LaMDA that requires less computing power, allowing Google to make the tool available to more users during testing.

With Bard using LaMDA’s conversational abilities to make Google Search more approachable, it’s hard not to imagine the company leveraging this technology to improve the Google Assistant. Text-based search could also benefit from Bard’s smarts — in fact, one screenshot shared in the official blog post today shows the chatbot providing a nuanced answer to a complex query before listing the typical links you’d expect in a Google Search result.

Google Search could soon integrate Bard's conversational answers

Google is holding a brief 45-minute event in Paris on February 8 at 8:30 am ET to go over its plans for integrating AI into Search and Maps. We expect the company to discuss Bard and its impending public rollout at the event, which will be streamed live on YouTube.