Google Bard (renamed Google Gemini)

Stephen M. Walker II · Co-Founder / CEO

What was Google Bard?

Google Bard was an AI-powered chatbot designed to simulate human-like conversations using natural language processing and machine learning. Google introduced it in 2023 as a response to the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, part of a broader wave of generative AI tools that reshaped digital communication and content creation.

Bard was initially built on Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and later updated to run on PaLM 2 (Pathways Language Model 2), unveiled at Google I/O 2023. Google released Bard on March 21, 2023 to a limited number of users in the U.S. and UK, then expanded it to the general public in over 180 countries and territories on May 10, 2023.

The chatbot pulled information from the web to provide fresh responses, incorporated Google Lens for image-based prompts, and could draft content such as emails, briefs, and summaries. It was built on Transformer, the neural network architecture developed by Google Research.

Bard's rebrand to Gemini

In February 2024, Google retired the Bard name and relaunched the product as Gemini, integrating the multimodal Gemini model family that had first been announced in December 2023. The rebrand brought a revamped interface, deeper integration with Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube, and support for text, voice, and image interactions across Android and iOS.

For current details on Google's AI assistant, including pricing and capabilities, see the Google Gemini glossary entry.

How Bard differed from other AI assistants

While it was active, Bard distinguished itself from chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT in a few key ways:

Live web access: Bard continually drew information from the internet, while ChatGPT's underlying models were limited to their training cutoff.
Google integration: Bard connected to Google Search and, later, Google Workspace apps, but offered no third-party plugin ecosystem comparable to ChatGPT's.
Voice and image input: Bard could read responses aloud and, with Google Lens, describe uploaded images.
Creative writing: ChatGPT was generally regarded as stronger at long-form and creative text generation, while Bard focused on research-oriented, factual responses.

These distinctions largely carried over into Gemini after the rebrand.

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