AI chatbot ChatGPT can already be used since late 2022 by almost anyone who would like to, but competitor Google Bard is still not available in Europe. Yet Google Bard has already been launched in 180 other countries and seems to have important differences with ChatGPT.
Understanding the differences between AI chatbots is important to know how AI will affect online marketing techniques and how SEO will work when AI developments start to be visibly implemented in search engines, such as Google and Bing. Therefore, today we are going to look at THE differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard.
What is Google Bard?
Since Google Bard is not yet available in the Netherlands, the image people have of an AI chatbot will mainly be driven by ChatGPT. Nevertheless, Google is also looking at the art from OpenAI and does not seem to be planning to significantly revamp the concept of an AI chatbot. Like ChatGPT, you can type your question in a bar to which the chatbot will respond with an automatically generated answer. Moreover, Google Bard already gives you instant question suggestions, which you can click on to start a conversation. Within Bard's chat environment, it is notable that you get not one answer but multiple versions of an answer, which you can then also have re-generated. However, the re-generated version is a very similar answer to the one that the chatbot has already provided, which means that, as with ChatGPT, you'll likely have to make your own adjustments to AI-generated content to tweak the text to your liking.
To provide automatically generated answers, Google's tool accesses real-time data from search engine Google. Based on this data, the chatbot then comes up with answers. In doing so, Google uses its own language model, which is no longer the LaMDA model but the PaLM (Pathways Language Model). A chatbot from Google is not new for now, as we were already familiar with Google Assistant. However, it is to be expected that Google Bard will replace this functionality as a more advanced, developed and futuristic AI chatbot that will become part of the search engine.
What is the difference between ChatGPT and Google Bard?
To begin, it is worth noting that Microsoft has invested significantly in ChatGPT, while Google Bard is a product of Google. Therefore, although both are AI-chatted, there are some key differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard.
As mentioned, Google Bard has access to real-time data within search engine Google, so it has no problems providing Google Bard users with relevant, up-to-date information. ChatGPT, on the other hand, currently falls rather short because it can only provide automatically generated answers based on data through 2021. Should you be looking for up-to-date information and want to ask questions about it to an AI chatbot, you are currently better off with Google Bard. However, Google Bard is not yet available in Europe, so Dutch information cannot yet be requested in the chat environment.
Perhaps more important than the difference in information is how the chatbots communicate this information to the user. Google Bard seems to be a much more human chatbot than ChatGPT, with whom you can have a personal conversation and from whom you can expect a personalized response based on your intent. In that light, it is not surprising that Google is presenting Bard with different answers to users and taking longer to make Bard available in Europe, because it takes time to figure out exactly what a personalized answer for a particular target group is. However, the fact that Bard is not yet available in Europe seems to be mainly due to stricter privacy laws and AI developments in the European Union.
By portraying Google Bard as a personalized AI chatbot, Google invokes the psychological side of algorithms and AI developments and seems to place great value on its reputation as a reliable and user-friendly search engine that provides desirable, personalized information. This while OpenAI seems to care little if their AI chatbot gives the weirdest answers to questions. Could OpenAI then be primarily interested in making the technology accessible to users? If ChatGPT serves primarily as a tool, that would explain why the chatbot also takes on roles such as translator, travel agent or researcher.
How are ChatGPT and Google Bard changing how search engines work?
Google Bard seems to fit very much within the image we already have of an AI chatbot, but like Microsoft, Google aims to integrate Bard into Google Search. The automatically generated search results will rank above paid ads and organic search results. For ChatGPT, this is already the case in Bing and Microsoft Edge, suggesting that Microsoft has the upper hand in the battle between competitors. That said, the integration of AI chatbots into search engines means a lot for information traffic on Web sites. With chatbots providing all relevant information to users, there seems to be less need to click on Web sites. However, it is still too premature to make any firm statements about this and what an SEO or SEA strategy will look like in the revamped search engines. After all, AI chatbots are still in development and how they will actually become part of search engines is ambiguous for now.
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Written by
Marit Buzing