Google will “open” access to Bard in the UK and US

Since Google announced Bard in early February, we waited for the next steps from the search engine company about its more than expected chatbot. Let’s recall that the official announcements of Bard and the new Bing took place only a few hours apart (Google’s CEO announced his AI on Monday the 6th, while Microsoft did it on Tuesday the 7th, and Google held an event where he talked about Bard, among other things. on Wednesday the 8th).

Since then, however, Microsoft has moved much faster than Google. On the same day that Bing was launched, those from Redmond opened a waiting list to try it out, only a week later they started sending out the first invitations, and as of last week they already offer instant access, which only requires a Microsoft Account (Hotmail, Outlook etc.) and access using Microsoft Edge.

Google however she was much more careful with Bard. As they said in their presentation, the first tests of their AI will be carried out with a small group of trusted testers, which is a very conservative approach, but we understand when we think that the company has much more at stake, its leadership, that Microsoft, that almost we can say that he had nothing to lose. Despite its failures, however, Bing managed to gain the interest of millions of people and served to significantly improve Microsoft’s image in terms of innovation.

Although I don’t have resources at Google (although I’d love to if you’re at Google and want to be man from the insidedon’t stop contacting me, thanks), it’s very clear to me that Microsoft’s turbo mode with the implementation of artificial intelligence in Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365 and more He caught the seeker with a changed stepand forced them to move forward within months on some of the announcements and launches originally reserved for the next Google I/O 2023.

So, after a few weeks where Google seemed to have dropped out, last week we saw it announce its plans to bring AI to Gmail, Google Docs and more, and today we know that Google has finally opened a waiting list for Bard yes, for now only available to US and UK usersand in American English only. If you meet these conditions, you can access it from this link. An interesting detail of the early stage of its current development is that, as you can see in the image above Google does not refer to this version of Bard as a Beta, but as an Experiment.

As always in these cases, there is no information about when the first invitations will be sent, their number, the expected date of the arrival of versions in other languages… in short, a new rather cautious move by Google. However, it seems that it is already open to new voluntary testers who can attach, which is a formula that seems to have worked pretty well for Microsoft from what we’ve seen.