Google Aims to Reach Billions with AI Chatbot Bard!

Google’s experimental chatbot Bard is on the path to developing another product with two billion users, an executive said Thursday at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York.

Bard, which empowers consumers to brainstorm and search for information through new artificial intelligence, is laying the groundwork for Google to attract more and more customers, its product manager Jack Krawczyk said in an interview.

One possibility is the company’s plan to spice up the timer-setting, command-filling Google Assistant with Bard’s human-driven suggestions. Connecting these products, first through mobile devices in the coming months, will bring artificial intelligence to even more people, Krawczyk said.

“We think it opens up a whole new path,” he said.

Google’s outlook highlights AI ambitions at its parent company, Alphabet, which has six products so far, each attracting billions of users, including its search engine and YouTube.

It also reflects growing competition. Amazon.com has promised to update its Alexa assistant with similar generative AI, while OpenAI recently added voice commands to ChatGPT, as well as other agent-like features.

According to the company, Google Assistant works on over a billion devices.

The way consumers gather information may evolve. Bard’s online traffic rose 2% to 8.7 million in October, even as main rival ChatGPT grew faster, Bank of America analysts said Thursday, citing similar online data. Google search traffic fell 0.4%, analysts said.

Krawczyk said his job is to improve Bard’s helpfulness, rather than cashing in on opportunities for monetization, such as a subscription model or ads, opportunities that may arise. Retention has varied over time with the introduction of faster and double-checked responses, he said.

But Bard has faced challenges. It is said to have invented non-existent messages when a user asked it to analyze the contents of their Gmail inbox, an example of the AI’s well-known tendency to “hallucinate” when asked for facts.

On Wednesday, Bard also stumbled after people wanted to use it in “record numbers,” Krawczyk said. OpenAI reported a major outage of ChatGPT on the same day.

“It seemed like a lot of language model products were down around the same time,” said Krawczyk, who did not name the competitors. “It was interesting to see the behavior patterns change on the Internet.”

He said: “We’re still learning how to most efficiently accommodate large people,” adding that it was a challenge “in a matter of minutes.” He and OpenAI each said they solved their own problems.

He said the spike reminded Krawczyk of what a Google search encountered on news of pop star Michael Jackson’s death in 2009.