Google joins AI race with Bard chatbot

For more than three months, Google executives have watched as projects at Microsoft and a San Francisco start-up called OpenAI have stoked the public’s imagination with the potential for artificial intelligence.

But on Tuesday, Google tentatively stepped off the sidelines as it released a chatbot called Bard. The new AI chatbot will be available to a limited number of users in the US and Britain and will accommodate additional users, countries and languages over time, Google executives said in an interview.

The cautious rollout is the company’s first public effort to address the recent chatbot craze driven by OpenAI and Microsoft, and it is meant to demonstrate that Google is capable of providing similar technology.