6 reasons Google Bard is better than ChatGPT – XDA Developers
Google Bard is better than the free version of ChatGPT for a lot of what I use, and these are six reasons why.
Google Bard started out pretty poorly when it was first launched. It felt like a rushed product that frequently got stuff wrong, but it's risen to become one of the best LLMs very quickly. Google has really done a lot of work with it to make it one of the best to use, and I use it way more than I use ChatGPT or Bing Chat. It's not perfect, and no LLM is, but it gets pretty close to being a companion that I've come to rely on for many things.
Also important to note is that we compared to the free version of ChatGPT. GPT-4 is much improved in many ways and may be able to achieve some of these too, but in terms of free LLMs, Google Bard has quickly become my go-to.
if you use ChatGPT, then you'll know that, despite its power, it can't actually access the internet or anything current. You can get internet access if you pay for it, but that's prohibitive for people who just want a tool to help them out. Once money enters the equation, it's hard to convince people to pay for something they don't actually need.
In the case of Google Bard, it acts more like a large language model with a search engine rather than just a massive, conversational form of the internet.
When you ask Bard a question, it will often actually give the source of whatever the answer it found was. That's already a massive leg-up when it comes to research, as not only does it help you understand the content it found, but you can then go to the source link to make sure that it's right. LLMs often "hallucinate," which is where they provide made-up information to the end-user. It's quite a frequent occurrence, but with sources, it makes it easier to verify if that's happening or not.
As an example, a friend of mine was struggling with an assignment in university. They wanted to see if the question had been asked elsewhere to help them understand it better, and were struggling to find it online. Plugging it into Google Bard and asking where the question came from not only netted the exact textbook it was from, but it also gave a step-by-step guide and a link to an online version of the textbook, too.
You can supply an image to Google Bard, and it can respond to the image, something that ChatGPT can't do right now in its free edition. Plus, users who pay money can, and OpenAI has said this feature will come to other users in the future, but as it stands currently it's inaccessible without coughing up some cash for it. It's a bit more of a niche feature, but it's useful if you have an image that you need to process, or you want to quickly pull text from an image.
I've used ChatGPT for a lot of programming, and it's done a pretty good job for me in the past at helping me out with stuff when I'm stuck. It can troubleshoot as well, but what I've been really surprised by is what Google Bard can do. I program a lot in Python for data analysis and graphing, and I've found that Google Bard is fantastic with it. I frequently ran into problems with ChatGPT where if it got the wrong answer the first time, no amount of correcting it would work to get the right answer. However, with Bard, I've been able to say "this is wrong; I need this" and it actually works.
Even better is that Bard will also give me the expected output of the graph generation code sourced from another website so that I can get an idea of what it looks like. It's immensely helpful when I'm trying to quickly figure out how to plot data that I've collected or make modifications to my already existing graphs. ChatGPT's GPT-4 (which you have to pay for) is apparently better, but in using Bing Chat I still found that Bard was better for the type of programming that I do.
Google Bard was always described as a complement to Google Search and not replacement, and in the case of Bard, I don't understand why. It's a fantastic search engine thanks to its ability to access current information and the wider internet. If I want to find a Reddit thread talking about a niche, I can ask Bard to find it for me, and most of the time it will, or I can ask it to find other items online for me, too.
Bard isn't perfect for this kind of usage, to be clear. Those who are good at Google searches will probably find that they're better off manually doing it, but sometimes it's great for just finding something quickly if I need to. ChatGPT can't do that at all because it doesn't have current access to the internet.
Google will allow you to directly export a result to Google Docs or to a draft in Gmail, which is great for those who may use Bard for proofreading or email generation. I know people who use tools like ChatGPT for that, and Bard has the added advantage of already being in the Google ecosystem.
There are add-ons you can get and plugins for ChatGPT that will simulate this integration, but they're not official and sometimes may even cost you money. Bard is free though for any users who use it, including for features like this.
If you're reading this post thinking that GPT-4 is better than Google Bard, to be honest, it probably is! OpenAI has been in the game a whole lot longer and has been making moves in the AI sphere the longest. However, GPT-4 isn't free and will set you back about $20 a month for a GPT Plus account. Google Bard is free and available globally, making it one of the best available right now if you don't want to invest any large sums of money into it.
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I’m Adam Conway, an Irish technology fanatic with a BSc in Computer Science and I’m XDA’s Lead Technical Editor. My Bachelor’s thesis was conducted on the viability of benchmarking the non-functional elements of Android apps and smartphones such as performance, and I’ve been working in the tech industry in some way or another since 2017.
In my spare time, you’ll probably find me playing Counter-Strike or VALORANT, and you can reach out to me at adam@xda-developers.com, on Twitter as @AdamConwayIE, on Instagram as adamc.99, or u/AdamConwayIE on Reddit.
