Business AI assistant: Google Bard or ChatGPT?

While Google Bard has been trusted by many professionals since its inception due to its potential integration with other Google tools, ChatGPT, used by more than 173 million people, offers proven features and numerous plug-ins. Is it now, or could it soon become more valuable to business users?

What is Google Bard?

ChatGPT, which uses GPT-3.5 (free version) or GPT-4 (paid version), is already well known around the world. Google Bard, on the other hand, is the search giant’s somewhat belated answer to the chatbot created by OpenAI.

It came to market four months after ChatGPT and was long available only in select locations. Based on the PaLM2 multilingual model, the tool has been available in Europe since July 2023. It is quickly gaining popularity due to its ease of use and no additional login required for Google users. But how does Google Bard compare to ChatGPT?

Google Bard’s main features

Google Bard, like ChatGPT, is an AI assistant that understands and answers complex questions in natural language. Nevertheless, Bard cannot answer all questions, especially those related to personal data, detailed technical solutions, or medical advice.

It doesn’t even try to do so by informing the user that it doesn’t process this kind of data, or that it’s just an AI assistant and its knowledge of it is limited.

Google Bard Functionalities

Google Bard has several key features that can attract business professionals.

1. Real-time access to information by connecting to Google search. After generating an answer, you can additionally search for related search terms in a classic window using ready-made questions and the “Google it” button.
2. It works fast and provides three versions of the answer right away. So you can quickly compare and choose the most satisfactory version.
3. It offers extensive sharing and integration with Google Workspace. Among other things, you can open a chat response as an email draft, or save it as a Google Doc.
4. You can edit voice tone and speech lengths using buttons rather than manually typed prompts.
5. Users can share links to individual responses or the entire thread.

Given these features, companies can consider Google Bard as a business assistant to help them, such as quickly editing emails, summarizing documents, or summarizing material available online.

Advantages and disadvantages of GB

Google Bard advantages

One of Bard’s greatest strengths indicating the potential direction of its development is the ability to communicate via a voice interface. This is because you can use the microphone to ask him questions, and then listen to the answers using the speaker icon visible next to it’s answers.

Its multimodal capabilities are extended by the attachment of images to questions, which has been available for only a few days. This feature significantly shortens the path leading from an image to a product description, or to the creation of prompts for generating similar visuals, such as with Dall-E or Midjourney.

Google Bard Disadvantages

However, it has not only advantages. Among its drawbacks we should mention the lack of an easily accessible copy function, which can make it difficult to transfer Bard content to documents and tools outside the Google Workspace ecosystem.

The second, much more severe problem is repetition, i.e. not always satisfactory results in generating longer texts, and a tendency to hallucinations comparable to earlier versions of ChatGPT. The latter is somewhat surprising, given that it is geared for Internet use. After prolonged testing, we get the impression that Google Bard needs to be reminded of the capabilities it has or to write explicitly that it should check the information. Guided in this way, it performs much better.

Google Bard vs ChatGPT

The choice between depends largely on whether you are comparing the free versions of the two tools, or the free Bard with the paid ChatGPT Plus.

For free tools, Google Bard seems to be more attractive. The main reason is that many people use AI chats to write emails and generate documents, which in this tool can be saved or sent with a single click. Other reasons are the good quality of responses, the ease of going to search and the possibility of future integrations.

For whom will Google Bard be a better solution? Its advantages and features will be particularly attractive to users tied to other Google tools. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is more versatile and independent of any particular ecosystem of tools. Bard will also be useful for people who work with images.

Also, up-and-coming are programming support tools integrated into the chat, rather than, as in the case of ChatGPT, available as an additional Code Interpreter plug-in only for paying users.

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