Google announced Bard, their response to ChatGPT, in February and since then the chatbot has been subjected to testing by a select group of users. As of Tuesday, the company is now opening access to Bard up to more users.

In a blog post that Vice President of Product Sissie Hsiao and Vice President of Research Eli Colling say bard helped write, they announced that those who are interested can sign up to use bard at bard.google.com. Access was initially opened to users in the US and UK on Tuesday, but will expand to other territories and language over time. According to the duo, opening up access to more people is “the next critical step in improving it.”

Bard works like ChatGPT, in that you talk to it like you would another human, with clear, natural language – and it will formulate a response for you. “You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,” the blog goes on to say.

The pair also wrote in the blog post that “Bard is a direct interface to an LLM, and we think of it as a complementary experience to Google Search.” For each result Bard offers up, you can either give it a thumbs up, thumbs down, refresh the answer, or click a button saying “Google it.”

Rather than running off of OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, Bard is powered by a “lightweight and optimized version” of Google’s LaMDA, and the company says it “will be updated with newer, more capable models over time.”

In the announcement, Google reiterated that LaMDA isn’t perfect. “For instance, because they learn from a wide range of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, those sometimes show up in their outputs,” the blog stated.

Google acknowledges that these challenges exist, and also notes that quality and safety are other issues that need to be considered as well. “We’ve also built in guardrails, like capping the number of exchanges in a dialogue, to try to keep interactions helpful and on topic,” the pair wrote. It was not made clear what the limit of exchanges currently is.

Despite their acknowledgement that Bard still needs to be improved, Google clearly believes in their product and will “continue to improve Bard and add capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences.”

Story via Engadget