Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that the tech giant will soon launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot called ‘Bard’, aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft.

According to a blog post by Pichai, the conversational AI service will be assessed by a group of “trusted testers” before being rolled out to the public in the coming weeks.

“Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity,” Pichai, the Indian-origin CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said on Monday, adding that Google’s chatbot will be able to explain complex subjects like new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old, PTI has reported.

Google’s announcement follows wide speculation that Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the firm behind it, OpenAI, according to the BBC.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was launched in November 2022, is capable of generating speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles and student essays or human-like text based on the input it is given.

Bard, built on Google’s existing large language model LaMDA, “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models”, Pichai, 50, said in the blog.

AI chatbots are designed to answer questions and find information.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai said in the blog post.