Google's Bard AI chatbot now open to the public

A photo of the blog post about Google Bard
(Image credit: Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central)

What you need to know

  • Google's AI chatbot Bard has been made available to the public. You can sign up to be on the waitlist but people will be accepted on a rolling basis. 
  • Google says you can use the chatbot to "boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas, and fuel your curiosity."
  • Google wants to get feedback from people to improve the software. 

Google's chatbot Bard is now open to the public, the company writes in a blog post

You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms, or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people," writes Sissie Hsiao, VP of product at Google, and Eli Collins, VP of research at Google. 

The software is open for users in the U.S. and the U.K., and people can sign up to be on the waitlist, which will accept people on a rolling basis. The chatbot is powered by LaMDA, a large language model the company developed internally.

This comes just a day after Google provided early access invitations for some Pixel Superfans.

The chatbot is similar to Microsoft's new Bing service, which partnered with OpenAI's software ChatGPT, where people can have back-and-forth conversations with Bard. 

ChatGPT does have the potential to automate even the most critical parts of our technology-driven lives, but it can also come with a loss of skills that many people have developed over the years, writes Android Central's Nick Sutrich.

More recently, Microsoft announced the integration of the ChatGPT service with its Office suite of products, and in turn, Google also announced that Bard would be coming to Google Workspace to help companies automatically generate documents.

Shruti Shekar
Editor in Chief

Shruti Shekar is Android Central's managing editor. She was born in India, brought up in Singapore, but now lives in Toronto and couldn't be happier. She started her journalism career as a political reporter in Ottawa, Canada's capital, and then made her foray into tech journalism at MobileSyrup and most recently at Yahoo Finance Canada. When work isn't on her mind, she loves working out, reading thrillers, watching the Raptors, and planning what she's going to eat the next day.