Three Compelling Reasons to Use Bard in 2024
It puts ChatGPT to rest on a few aspects important for all language learners
I’ve spent tons of time last year talking about how great ChatGPT is. This year, we’re going further and talking about other tools too. Because, as it turns out, ChatGPT might not be the best available anymore. At least when it comes to free versions.
If you haven’t tried it, it’s time for you to test Bard.
Let me quickly tell you about it.
Bard is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It’s an AI chatbot tool for conversations.
When it came out, its main advantage was its connectivity to Google. You could ask it to look up stuff online, get real-time answers, and talk about those. Well, you were supposed to at least. There are tons of pictures online proving it wasn’t so great.
A few months later, Bard added connectivity to Google Flights, Sheets, YouTube, etc., adding even more possibilities to what you could do and potentially becoming a real assistant.
My tests with it were not so great. When I asked it about a certain topic I knew was in my emails, it pulled some I didn’t need and ignored the ones I knew had the needed information. Obviously, it’s still got some ways to go but we gotta start somewhere, right?
As for connectivity with YouTube, it could be a useful one for language learners but it only works for English and not even all videos. Google announced on December 18th this now worked for Japanese and Korean but I haven’t succeeded in having a single video summary in either language despite over 30 different tries from all kinds of videos.
Google also updated Bard in the form of Gemini Pro on December 6th.
According to their tests, that last update officially made Bard “better” than ChatGPT 3.5 (the free version). But, as I mentioned in my comparison of Chatbots, ChatGPT is actually still better. And it also has the added bonus of having Custom Instructions to get much better results.
Still, Bard is now officially useful for learners.
And that’s what I’m all about.
Connectivity = Potential
While ChatGPT and Bard are incredible sources of information and can work as great assistants, we must admit they’re imperfect, make hallucinations, and sometimes require more effort than needed to get what we’re looking for.
Luckily, no matter what you’re learning, I’m willing to bet some people have written or made a video about it. The problem is usually finding said video or article.
Luckily, we can now ask a question to Bard, work through it, and then ask for links to great content just about it.
Or we can work the other way around.
We can ask Bard to share links to resources, study with those, and then turn back to ask questions about the parts we didn’t get.
This is currently impossible with the free version of ChatGPT1 which makes it better for things like grammar study or some topic-specific vocabulary study.
Different versions of the same
One of the features I absolutely love from Bard has been there from the beginning: multiple drafts.
While ChatGPT and other such chatbots give you an answer you can generate again, Bard responds fast with one answer and has a button to see “other drafts.”
By clicking on it, you get instant access to two other “draft” responses to the same query.
Is that useful? Well it can in many cases, such as:
Get 3 different explanations about the same grammar patterns
Get 3 different stories about the same topic, likely from a different angle
Get 3 different ways to continue a conversation at a crossroads
Combine this with the idea of looking for stuff online and you can get multiple resources too.
Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, there’s always a speaker icon 🔊 to listen to the text. Something I truly wish ChatGPT offered too! 😢
Working with videos
Still, despite all this, I believe the most potentially impacting evolution Bard can bring is its connection to YouTube. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, it’s not working properly yet.
I mentioned in my comparison of major LLMs that we could for now use it to get started from English videos but that’s still rather inconvenient. I do hope (and expect) it to get better within this year though so I’ll let you know when it does!
Breaking Down the Best Language Models of the Year
We’re about to finish the first entire year with access to AI for us muggles and we’ve now got incredible tools and assistants for pretty much anything. And especially…
Bard’s update is just the start
The Gemini update was just the start. I’m sure 2024 will bring us even more surprises from all the tools we’ve seen so far.
Claude 2 was always better than ChatGPT when it came to context size and Anthropic—the company behind it— is pushing further. Pi, from Inflection AI, announced in late November a new model called Inflection-2 better than every other tool but GPT-4. It’s not live and proofs will be needed but still, they’re ramping up.
OpenAI and ChatGPT surely won’t slow down either.
A new year is upon us and using AI daily to learn, improve, and even feel better will be a must soon enough.
I’ll let you know my discoveries along the way of course!
Cheers for reading,
Mathias
You can do it with the paid version though but that’s not a fair comparison.