What you need to know
- Google has created a “Beta Updates” page for Bard.
- The page serves as patch notes for what has been recently entered into the AI chatbot.
- The latest update includes more search options when you click “Google it” and additional updates to Bard’s math and logic abilities.
AI chatbots can do a lot, and while it’s not obvious what is often done to make them useful, Google comes up with a quick fix.
Google’s chatbot, Bard, opened three weeks ago to the general public after a short stint with trusted testers. With more people moving around, the company has created a new “beta updates” page for Bard, which seems to work like its page for Pixel phones, where users can come and read the patch notes for a new update.
It breathes greater transparency to the user as Google explains “what” the update is to Bard and “why”.
Google Bard’s “Inaugural Update” patch notes from earlier this week state that the new beta page has been created to “publish the latest features, improvements, and bug fixes for the Bard experience.” The reason given by Google is so that users can see what is happening and provide feedback.
The “Google it” option receives additional search topics whenever it is selected. The Mountain View-based company hopes this will help users find a wide range of interests in related topics. Finally, the company has pushed to update Bard’s math and logic abilities. This is to help the AI chatbot provide “high quality” responses to math and logic prompts.
This specific upgrade to Bard’s math and logic capabilities is due to Google’s recent implementation of its PaLM language model. PaLM comes to help chatbots understand and respond to multi-step word and math problems because of a language model that uses a “chain of thoughts”.
Google Bard and Microsoft’s use of ChatGPT (OpenAI) for Bing are competitors in this area. The former is starting to bring its generative AI efforts to other parts of its digital ecosystem, such as Docs and Gmail. But with all that these automated chatbots can do and the ways they are being improved with more functionality, it begs the question: do we really need them?