GOOGLE'S ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT 'BARD' SET FOR NEXT STAGE

Google announced Tuesday it's allowing more people to interact with " Bard," the artificially intelligent chatbot the company is building to counter Microsoft's early lead in a pivotal battleground of technology.

In Bard's next stage, Google is opening a waitlist to use an Al tool that's similar to the ChatGPT technology Microsoft began deploying in its Bing search engine to much fanfare last month. And last week, Microsoft embedded more Alpowered technology in its word processing, spreadsheet and slide presentation programs with a new feature called Copilot.

Until now, Bard had only been available to a small group of “trusted testers” hand-picked by Google. The Mountain View, California, company, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., isn’t saying how many people will be given access to Bard in the next step of the technology’s development. Initial applicants will be limited to the U.S. and the U.K. before Google offers Bard in more countries.