Google Bard Cheat Sheet: What Is Google Bard, and How Does It Work?

Bard is Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot that generates responses to user-provided natural language prompts. In response to a prompt, Bard can pull information from the internet and present a response. The large language model behind Bard delivers the response in natural language — in contrast to a standard Google search, where a result consists of a snippet of information or a list of links.

Google announced Bard in February 2023 after OpenAI and Microsoft both garnered attention for AI chatbot systems. And in May 2023, Bard and related AI advancements featured prominently in Google’s I/O event.

According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Bard is ” … an experimental conversational AI service.”

In fact, Google places the word “Experiment” next to the system’s name to show it’s still a work in progress. Additionally, Google indicates that “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views” in a disclaimer placed below the prompt box.

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Bard’s prompt-response process can help you obtain answers faster than a standard Google search sequence.

A classic Google search requires you to enter a natural language query or keywords, follow links, review content and then compile the results or repeat the process with a refined search.

SEE: Check out these Google Bard search prompting tips.

With Bard, you enter a prompt, then review the response. If the response isn’t exactly what you want, you have at least three options:

Bard can handle all sorts of tasks, but many of the most common uses are covered by the categories of capabilities detailed below.

As a large language model, Bard can adeptly summarize text. For example, provide a link to a web page and ask Bard to summarize the contents, e.g.:

You also can suggest a specific length if you want a particular degree of brevity, such as “Please summarize in 100 words.”

Bard can compare two or more items. In many cases, when you ask Bard to compare things, the system will display some of the data in a table. For example, if you prompt Bard:

Similarly, you may ask Bard to compare web pages.

Bard may serve as a suggestion engine for products, services or activities. Enter the title of books, music or movies you like, then ask Bard to suggest others. This can be useful when you’re researching unfamiliar topics. For example, you might try:

When you want to learn about a topic or historical event, you can ask Bard to explain it to you. If you like, you may suggest a desired level in order to guide the system toward an explanation that may be either easier to understand or more detailed. For a general overview of a core technology that helps make Bard work, you might ask:

One of the best uses of a chatbot is to gather a long list of ideas. Ask Bard to “Brainstorm ideas for…” followed by whatever topic you wish, such as a new project, promotional effort or paper. Encourage Bard to provide creative, unusual or inventive ideas for additional variety in the responses.

In April 2023, Bard added the ability to create and help debug code in more than 20 programming languages. When you ask for code, make sure to specify the programming language and describe in as much detail as possible the code you need. If the code generated doesn’t work, let Bard know what exactly went awry, and ask for a suggested fix or for help interpreting an error code.

SEE: Explore other Google Bard enhancements.

Bard can help you write, too. As with most prompts, provide as much detail about the topic, length, format (blog post, poem, essay, book report, etc.) and style as possible. If you have a rough outline of a blog post, you might include the desired points in your prompt. For this section of text, for example, you might prompt:

The responses Bard generated were reasonable and might have required only a little editing and correction to be usable.

Google makes it easy to move Bard text elsewhere. Select the response export button to move content to either a new Google Doc or Gmail. Alternatively, select the More button (the three vertical dots), then choose Copy to place the response text on the system clipboard for pasting into any app of your choice.

Since Bard can access internet content, many conventional keyword searches will also work in Bard. Ask about current news topics, weather forecasts or pretty much any standard keyword search string. However, Bard will provide responses mostly in conventional text, sometimes supplemented with images, whereas Google search may show content in custom formats (e.g., weather forecasts often display a chart). When you seek a set of links, switch out of Bard back to a standard Google search.

As of September 2023, people who sign in to Bard with personal Google accounts may optionally enable extensions. These extensions allow Bard to draw data from other Google services, including Google Flights, Hotels, Maps, Workspace (Gmail, Docs and Drive) and YouTube.

Bard can get things wrong. Select the Double-check Response to take the generated text, search Google for it and then highlight supporting sources in light green and those not found in light orange. Never rely solely on content provided in Bard responses without verification. When Bard does provide an inaccurate, misleading or inappropriate response, select the thumbs down icon to convey to the system that it provided a bad response. Remember, Bard is an experiment.

Google labels Bard as an experiment and declares “it will make mistakes.” Even the Double-check It with Google feature may make mistakes. As a generative AI chatbot, Bard provides content that may seem accurate, but it should always be considered carefully, reviewed thoroughly and checked before use.

In addition, Bard has a limited context window, which means that it may “forget” content in a long conversation.

At launch in March 2023, Google limited Bard access via a waitlist to people with personal Google accounts. In early May 2023, Google eliminated the waitlist and made Bard more widely available.

To access Bard, go to https://bard.google.com in a web browser, and sign in with a Google account (Figure A).

Figure A

If your account is managed by a Google Workspace administrator, such as an account for work or school, the administrator may adjust settings to either allow or prevent access to Bard. Check with your administrator, should you have any questions.

If you are a Google Workspace administrator and wish to review or adjust the settings that affect Bard availability for people in your organization, access the Admin console | Apps | Additional Google services | Early Access Apps, then modify the Service status and Core Data Access Permissions as desired.

On October 4, Google announced that Bard features will come to Android and iOS devices. Assistant with Bard will allow multimodal interpretation, i.e. analysis of text, audio or video, and reply to natural language questions. Assistant with Bard will be available to early testers “soon,” Google said.

Bard is available in more than 230 countries and territories, including all 27 European Union countries (e.g., Germany, France, Italy and Spain) as well as Brazil.

Bard is available in more than 40 languages. And, according to Google’s support pages, Bard supports not only seven of the most widely spoken languages — English, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali and French — but also Japanese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, German, Gujarati, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Kannada, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

Yes, Google gives you control over your Bard activity history, much as it does your search and browsing history. To adjust the settings, select the Activity icon (a clock surrounded by a counter-clockwise pointing arrow and line) from the upper-right area. Then, you may choose whether Bard Activity history is on or off (Figure B).

Figure B

If on, you may choose to Auto-delete activity after three, 18 or 36 months or not at all. Additionally, you may access your Bard activity history, which can be helpful if you wish to review or rerun a previous prompt.

Yes, Google Bard is available to use for free. Google Bard is free of advertising as well.

Google requires you to be 18 years of age or older to use Bard. An administrator must specifically choose to allow access to Bard for accounts connected to a Google Workspace organization. Even if allowed, you should make sure your use of Bard complies with your organization’s policies.

Google takes measures to make Bard useful and helpful but also prominently notes that the system “may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.” To preserve privacy, do not share any personal or private information with Bard in your prompts.

In May 2023, Google announced that Bard had switched to using Pathways Language Model 2 rather than Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google promotes PaLM 2 as a ” … state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities.”

SEE: Learn how to successfully use ChatGPT.

Google plans to make PaLM 2 available in four distinct sizes: Gecko, Otto, Bison and Unicorn. The distinct sizes are intended to serve a wide range of computing environments. The smallest, Gecko, is intended to be functional even on a mobile device without an internet connection.

Bard is a large language model by Google that is built from vast data sets; Google also designed Bard to be able to access the internet. This combination of capabilities lets Bard devise natural language responses that include relevant current data in response to a prompt.

Bard also gets information from Gemini, Google’s multimodal generative AI model released in December. Gemini Pro for Bard is available now in English for text-based prompts.

Bard uses PaLM 2 in languages other than English. On Dec. 6 Google Product Director Jack Krawczyk said Google was working on a “clearer indication in bard of which model is serving you.”

Google expects to release Gemini Ultra, a more capable model which can analyze and generate audio, code and video as well as text, in a beta test program of Bard Advanced in early 2024.

The ability to access current internet content is a key differentiator between Google Bard and many other chatbot AI systems. Many large language model chatbot systems were trained on older data and lack access to information about current events. This inability to browse the internet limits the usefulness of many of these systems.

Four alternatives to Bard that can access current internet content and are worth exploring are:

Another alternative to Bard that lacks access to current internet content is:

Is ServiceNow Stock a Top Buy for 2024?

Someone forgot to tell ServiceNow (NOW 0.64%) that the cloud software industry has been slowing down in 2023. The digital transformation platform's revenue growth has actually been accelerating throughout the last year, and the stock has picked up steam as 2024 approaches. Shares of ServiceNow are up 80% in 2023 with just weeks left to go until the new year.

A high valuation has prevented many investors from pulling the trigger on buying this top cloud stock. After an epic run, is it still a top buy for 2024?

ServiceNow provides numerous solutions for businesses to manage their workforce and customer experiences. Its platform spans digital workflow management tools, from AI that helps find bottlenecks that are slowing down the completion of tasks to cloud observability solutions that help with app performance.

ServiceNow landed on the radar of many investors this past summer after an expanded partnership was struck with Nvidia. ServiceNow said it would adopt Nvidia's latest and greatest AI systems to improve its own platform, and in turn, Nvidia would expand its use of ServiceNow in its own workflow management for developing more powerful chips and generative AI systems.

This type of AI used to automate more employee tasks is powering "digital transformation" among big customers. In a year like 2023 where cost-cutting has been a top priority in the corporate world, it's helped keep demand high for ServiceNow's software. And, after the bear market of 2022, the company's revenue growth has been ratcheting up again.

Period

Total Revenue

Increase (YOY)

2021

$5.9 billion

30%

2022

$7.25 billion

23%

Q1 2023

$2.1 billion

22%

Q2 2023

$2.15 billion

23%

Q3 2023

$2.29 billion

25%

Data source: ServiceNow. YOY = year over year.  

Even better, though, has been ServiceNow's rapid progress on profitability. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) income from operations was $492 million in the first nine months of 2023, compared to just $200 million in the same period in 2022. Free cash flow (FCF) was $1.36 billion in the first nine months of 2023 (a healthy FCF profit margin of 21%), with the discrepancy between GAAP profitability primarily driven by employee stock-based compensation.

As for that employee stock-based compensation, ServiceNow management reported it repurchased $282 million worth of stock in Q3 2023. This is part of the company's first-ever stock repurchase program, which is aimed at offsetting the impact of dilution from ongoing employee stock-based compensation. About $1.2 billion worth of stock repurchase authorization remained at the end of the quarter.

After the big run-up in stock price in 2023, ServiceNow trades for a high premium of 90 times trailing-12-month earnings per share, or about 60 times trailing-12-month FCF. Of course, part of the premium exists because ServiceNow's profit margins are expected to rise rapidly over the course of the next few years. To wit, shares trade for a bit more reasonable 55 times Wall Street analysts' expectation for 2024 earnings per share.

ServiceNow is nevertheless an expensive stock as we head into the new year. That can cause some turbulence in stock price, including steep sell-offs if ServiceNow misses some short-term financial estimates from one quarter to the next.

However, given the company's fast-and-steady growth for years, and leadership in cloud-based and AI-powered software, investors are rightfully optimistic about the business's trajectory. As I explained this time last year, I think a stock like ServiceNow is best bought in batches over the course of time, perhaps using a dollar-cost averaging plan. This still seems like the right strategy for those investors interested in the long-term potential (a decade and beyond) for ServiceNow.