Tuesday marks the US and UK launches of the Google Bard chatbot, capping off the company’s mad drive to introduce a rival to Bing Chat and ChatGPT. It is viewed as a “do or die” situation for the business. Its lucrative web search service risks being outperformed by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Those chatbots currently struggle to reliably produce accurate and helpful results. Jack Krawczyk, the product lead for Google Bard, described the service as a “experiment” but added that the firm was “very enthusiastic” to see how users were utilizing it to foster their creativity. They are able to develop their thoughts more quickly and really feed their curiosity thanks to it. “We feel like we’ve reached the limit of the testing phase of this experiment,” Krawczyk added, “and now we want to gradually begin to roll it out. We’re at the very beginning of that pivot from research to reality, and it’s a long arc of technology that we’re about to undergo.” Like its competitors, Bard allows users to type inquiries and requests in everyday English. It can respond to complex enquiries with original ideas, conversing back and forth. Starting on Tuesday, users can join a waiting list on the business website to request access. Live Demo In a live demonstration, Krawczyk demonstrated how Bard assisted him in coming up with ideas for his son’s birthday celebration that combined his two loves: bunnies and gymnastics. He narrowed down on one suggestion that was more focused on the “gymnastics” than the “rabbit” part using one of Bard’s unique features. It has the ability to quickly click between three answers to the same question. He then asked the chatbot to generate an email invitation. Then, he inserted the address of the actual venue that he had found through research. The unanticipated follow-up, though, was less striking. When asked to propose activities for two kids visiting Tokyo on vacation, Bard first offered a visit to the Tsukiji fish market. It neglected to disclose that a sizable portion of the market relocated to a new location in 2018. The chatbot acknowledged this in a subsequent query and provided footnotes to the accurate data. “The answers aren’t going to be perfect along the way,” Krawczyk said, adding that for some queries a conventional Google search would remain the best option. “There’s a...