Google wants AI chatbot Bard to help it reach billions of users

By Jeffrey Dastin

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google's experimental chatbot Bard is its path to developing another product with two billion users, a director said on Thursday at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York.

Bard, which lets consumers brainstorm and fetch information with the help of new artificial intelligence, is laying the ground work for Google to attract still more customers, its Product Lead Jack Krawczyk said in an interview.

Among the opportunities is the company's plan to liven its timer-setting, command-fulfilling Google Assistant with Bard's collaborative responses. Connecting these products, first via mobile devices in the coming months, will introduce AI to more people, said Krawczyk.

"We think that opens a completely new path," he said.

The Google Assistant lives on more than one billion devices, according to company data.

Google's outlook underscores ambitions for AI at parent Alphabet, which to date has six products each attracting billions of users, among them Gmail and YouTube.

It also reflects growing competition. Amazon.com has vowed to upgrade its Alexa aide with similar generative AI, while OpenAI recently added voice commands to ChatGPT, plus other agent-like capabilities.

The way consumers gather information may evolve in the meanwhile. Bard's web traffic grew 2% in October to 8.7 million, though chief rival ChatGPT grew at a faster pace, Bank of America analysts said Thursday citing Similar Web data. Google Search traffic fell 0.4%, the analysts' note said.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)