Microsoft ChatGPT vs Google Bard: Who Will Win the Chatbot Race?

Google recently announced plans to start testing Bard, its new chatbot, beginning with a small private group before releasing the technology to the public.

On February 6, 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai published a blog post detailing the plan to start integrating artificial intelligence features in its search engine.

Named Bard in reference to its storytelling capacities, Google’s model is based on the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), an experimental technology that Google has been testing within the company and with a limited number of outsiders over several months.

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation in either verbal or written form, providing humans with interaction via digital devices as if they were speaking to a real person. Some chatbots are rudimentary programs created to answer a single query with a short response, while others are incredibly sophisticated, learning and evolving to deliver increasingly personalized results as they process and gather information.

You may have interacted with a chatbot without even realizing it. One common type of chatbot is a pop-up window on a computer screen asking if you need help.

Chatbots are driven by automation, AI, machine learning, and natural-language processing. They are increasingly being used by forward-thinking enterprises that recognize the benefits of chatbots to both themselves and their customers.

Chatbots are commonly encountered in customer service, where they help to swiftly resolve customer queries, reduce the need for human interaction, and free up staff for other tasks.

Within moments of Google’s unveiling of Bard, Microsoft responded by announcing that it would shortly be staging its own special press event, sparking speculation that the company could be on the verge of launching Bing ChatGPT to the public.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, suggested that the tech giant would soon be sharing progress “on a few exciting projects.” Microsoft’s announcement came just days after it extended its partnership with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, in a deal worth a reported $10 billion. Insiders suggested that the deal could culminate in Microsoft becoming OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner, with Microsoft’s services powering OpenAI workloads across all products, research, and API services.

Microsoft subsequently staged its press conference at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on February 7, 2023, the day after Google unveiled Bard. Microsoft shared its plans to revamp the Bing search engine, infusing it with artificial intelligence in one of the company’s biggest efforts to pioneer a new wave of technology and reshape how people access and gather information.

Staking its future on AI by partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars as part of ambitious efforts to rival Alphabet Inc.’s Google, potentially gaining colossal returns through the development of tools that accelerate content creation.

At the news briefing, Microsoft’s CEO suggested that the technology boasted the power to “reshape pretty much every software category.” Following Nadella’s announcement, Microsoft’s share price rose by an impressive 3.8 percent and traded at $266.02 a share.

Meanwhile, Google has high hopes for Bard, with CEO Pichai emphasizing its ability to deliver responses based on up-to-date information. He explained that the AI search technology combines the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s large language models, drawing on information from across the web to deliver fresh, high-quality responses.

Google also announced that its latest AI technologies — including PaLM, LaMDA, MusicLM, and Imagen — would be integrated into its search engine. Pichai explained that these new AI-powered features would enable the search engine to distill complex information into easily digestible formats.

Industry experts predict that the services provided by ChatGPT and Google’s Bard could be similar — likely, users will key in a request, question, or prompt and receive a humanlike response. Both Google and Microsoft plan to embed AI tools to bolster their search engines, which account for a sizeable proportion of both companies’ revenues.

Both Bard and ChatGPT distill complex information and multiple perspectives, making it easier to digest. However, the most obvious difference between the two technologies is Bard’s ability to include recent events in responses. Although precisely how the platforms will differ is yet unknown, experts suggest that Bard will benefit from increased access to data.

OpenAI’s GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, was first launched in 2020 with the GPT 3.5 series of language models that today form the backbone of ChatGPT.

While Bard is currently only available to a group of testers, OpenAI made a free preview of ChatGPT available for public use on November 30, 2022. However, Pichai’s announcement confirmed that Google’s conversational AI service would be made widely available soon.

Several other tech companies are keen to join the race, including Baidu, China’s answer to Google, which recently unveiled its AI solution, Ernie.