Got my invite to Google Bard today. Short summary so far: feels like a huge construction site, with varying levels of maturity in the individual areas. Hardly worth anyone’s time at this point.
Some more detailed impressions:
- default response: “I’m a language model and don’t have the capacity to help with that.” - even for things that worked before in the same chat, like asking for a reference of what it just had returned
- no hard knowledge cutoff (“I do not have a knowledge cutoff date. I am constantly learning and updating my knowledge base. I am able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results.”), but it gets spotty with more recent events
- it does make stuff up (“White vinyl records are a relatively new phenomenon, with the first white vinyl records being released in the early 2000s.”)
- language comprehension appears deficient at times
- no foreign language support, it seems
- query for the “most recent” Apple Watch fails:
- inconsistent presentation (see above screenshot)
- programming stuff is not supported: “I’m still learning coding skills, so at the moment I can’t help with this. I’m trained to do things like help you write lists about different topics, compare things, or build travel itineraries.”
- interactively working on an SVG works, though. It’s self-image (“add a bard”) is… unexpected, though 😀
- Google calendar integration!
- no API
Nice features:
- references given, although rarely and non-autoritative
- the Google-It button, proposing a Google search string Also odd: it won’t answer basic fun questions like “when did John Lennon live?”, but questions like “Did Bob Metcalfe win the Turing award” are ok
Conclusion: it’s far from being a serious competitor to (Chat)GPT.