The world is witnessing an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. From OpenAI ChatGPT-4 to Bing, AI is reinventing the search experience like never before. Since Open AI released its first conversational AI tool in November 2022, other tech companies have followed suit. This has led to a surge of innovation and competition within the field as businesses strive to improve their AI capabilities and gain a foothold in the market.
For decades, Google has dominated search. However, in February 2023, Microsoft unveiled its new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge, powered by the same advanced technology that OpenAI used to build ChatGPT.
Designed to be a searcher’s co-pilot for the web, Bing AI aims to deliver better search results, generate human-like answers with citations and summarize web pages. Thanks to ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing AI poses a real threat to the Google search engine.
In response, Google officially released its own conversational AI tool named BARD last March 21, 2023. BARD aims to deliver more sophisticated and intuitive conversational capabilities, enabling Google to compete better with Bing and other AI-powered platforms. At the time of writing, only select users can access Google BARD. Users in the U.S. and U.K. can sign up for a waitlist at bard.google.com.
However, Google has continuously reminded users that BARD is still in the experimental phase. If that’s the case, then we’re merely at the beginning stages of the AI tech race and users can look forward to even more incredible advancements from these two tech giants.
If you’ve been following AI trends, you’re probably wondering what is BARD? In this article, we talk about the new Google AI chatbot, its capabilities and limitations and how AI affects SEO or search engine optimization in the long run.
What Is BARD?
Google BARD is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot powered by the LaMDA large language model. Users can feed the Google chatbot questions and creative prompts.
LaMDA, short for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” understands natural speech and generates human-like responses to questions about various topics. Unlike most language models, LaMDA was trained in dialogue. It’s built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research developed in 2017.
Transformer produces a model that can be trained to read multiple words, analyze how those words relate to one another and then predict the next words in a sentence.
Through this, Google AI chatbot can understand user requests and respond appropriately based on real-time information extracted from the internet. This conversational AI tool can also be used to generate different types of content, such as articles, blog topics, essays, recipes, songs, poems, short stories and more.
How Does BARD Work?
To start a conversation, go to bard.google.com. Then enter a prompt or a question in the text box at the bottom. Then BARD displays the answer all at once, much faster than other AI chatbots. You can rate the response with a thumbs up or thumbs down button.
Google claims that BARD was never meant to replace search. Rather, it offers a complementary experience to search. This is why you’ll see a “Google It” button at the bottom of most BARD responses. Clicking on it allows users to easily switch from BARD to Google’s search engine for more information about the topic.
The Mind-Blowing Capabilities of Google’s AI Tech
Discuss Various Topics
The Google AI chatbot can answer questions about almost any subject, including art, history, technology, finance, entertainment, culture and current events.
Summarize Complex Ideas
If you want to understand complex subjects like machine learning or cryptocurrency, Google BARD can give clear and concise explanations.
Brainstorm Ideas
Need a list of topics for a blog post or social media content calendar? Google BARD AI can assist you with advancing your ideas.
Generate Content
Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot can help create first drafts of outlines, emails, blog posts, poems, recipes, social media posts and much more. It boasts scriptwriting and storytelling capabilities that can help you craft advertising messages for products and services.
Develop Plans
Google BARD AI can develop a meal plan tailored to your preferences, lifestyle and dietary restrictions. It can also help create helpful travel itineraries that fit your budget and interests.
Annotate Some Responses
The Google chatbot only provides a citation if it directly quotes at length from a webpage. Otherwise, it won’t cite its sources since it “generates original content” and does “not replicate existing content at length.”
What Google BARD Can’t Do
BARD acknowledges its limits right off the bat. Users will see a message at the top of the page that says BARD has “limitations and won’t always get it right,” but feedback will help it improve.”
Like most AI chatbots, Google’s AI language model exhibits limitations such as hallucinations, inaccurate answers, made-up information and social biases. And Google is aware of this. In fact, under the chat box is a disclaimer that says, “BARD may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”
Additionally, Google BARD holds back on talking about sensitive topics. While it can give general information on various legal, political or medical topics, it cannot give advice, express preferences or endorse a certain outlook.
Google reiterates that BARD isn’t a finished product at this stage. It doesn’t even have a logo or a prominent brand look yet. In short, the Google chatbot is far from perfect, but Google assures that these are all AI tech issues they’re working to resolve.
What Is GPT-4 and How Does It Relate to BARD?
Many have been asking, “What is GPT-4, and how does it differ from its predecessor, ChatGPT-3?
GPT-4 is the latest version of the language model created by OpenAI. The company claims that GPT-4 contains major upgrades in three key areas: creativity, visual input and longer context. Unlike GPT-3, GPT-4 can interact with images and process up to 25,000 words of text from the user. OpenAI GPT 4 currently powers Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot and has been showing promising results so far.
At their core, both Google Bard and OpenAI GPT 4 rely on natural language processing, where users input a question or prompt and the chatbots generate a human-like response. But where Google’s LaMDA is developed for dialogue, OpenAI GPT 4 is built for text functions.
ChatGPT was trained on vast amounts of data from books, articles, documents, Wikipedia, Common Crawl and content scraped from the open internet. However, ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff is 2021. It may only be able to talk about current world events or topics within that time frame.
On the other hand, BARD was trained on Infiniset, a data set including Wikipedia, Common Crawl, documents and conversations from the internet. BARD scours the web in real-time to find the latest answers to user queries.
The Future of Search: How AI Affects SEO
While the future of AI language models remains uncertain, it will surely impact search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, Google has already released its new search guidelines for SEO AI content.
Thanks to the ability of AI language models to comprehend human speech, search results may display more personalized content that offers real value and aligns with search intent. Instead of prioritizing keywords, brands may have to shift their focus to delivering useful, authoritative and conversational SEO AI content.
Additionally, websites should also follow these SEO best practices:
• Use descriptive and keyword-rich URLs.
• Optimize your website for mobile devices.
• Focus on long-tail keywords in question form.
• Get high-quality backlinks from relevant, trustworthy websites.
• Fine-tune on-page elements, including images, title tags, headings and meta descriptions.
• Fix broken links, crawl errors and duplicate content.
• Implement structured data markup to help search engines better understand your content and improve your search visibility.
Lastly, staying on top of AI trends can help you use these tools more effectively to provide higher-quality content and boost rankings.
Craft High-Quality Content That Appeals to People and Search Engines
Amid rapid changes in the world of SEO AI, Thrive can help ensure your website doesn’t fall behind. We stay up-to-date with the latest AI trends and adapt our practices accordingly.
Get in touch with us today to learn more about our local SEO and digital marketing solutions.
