Microsoft Bing vs. Google Bard: Comparison between the AI tools

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the first to make the move, Bard and Bing are owned by two of the biggest tech firms in Silicon Valley, and will be interesting to observe how the race between them will roll out in the future.

Hyderabad: When ChatGPT was launched last year, apart from making waves in the IT industry, it also triggered an AI race between the tech giants. While many companies played catch-up with this trend, Microsoft’s Bing that incorporated ChatGPT, and Google’s own interactive chatbot Bard are the current two frontrunners.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the first to make the move, Bard and Bing are owned by two of the biggest tech firms in Silicon Valley, and will be interesting to observe how the race between them will roll out in the future. Let’s take a look at both of these AI chatbots.

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Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, had less than 3% of the search market share, because of Google’s popularity. However, it took no time in embracing ChatGPT and integrating this AI tech into its search engine. Microsoft actually licenses GPT tech from OpenAI into Bing and has seen a nearly 16% bump in traffic since, suggest reports.

Bing Chat uses the latest version of GPT, the GPT-4. It is trained on data from the web and gives answers that are only updated till 2021.

The company also came up with Microsoft 365 Copilot, an artificial intelligence assistant feature for Microsoft 365 applications and services like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It can also create PowerPoint presentations and Excel data visualization with just a single line prompt. It will also draft email responses and summarize long email threads in Outlook. Also, Bing offers three chat modes and the answers are lengthy and elaborate.

Bing is free to use, but Microsoft mostly relies on ad revenue so you may see sponsored advertisements. And it is interesting to add that its parent the ChatGPT has a paid version for its elite users.

Moving on to Bard, it came a bit later to the market than ChatGPT or Bing Chat. There have been complaints of it not working accurately, but lately, it has been doing much better.

The trump card that Google Bard holds over Bing and ChatGPT is data. As Google is the biggest search engine currently, its AI chatbot has access to real-time data, unlike GPT which relies on past data. Here, answers are short and to the point.

Like Microsoft, Google also integrated AI into its other entire sister apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and others. Bard was recently made available to around 180 countries for free.

Experts say that Bard has a long way to go till it gains more popularity. That said, it is one of the most promising tools and has the potential to create a whole new experience for Android users.