Skift Take
The updated version of Bard did well with some travel tasks, particularly finding flight options, but its answers still need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Google this week released a new version of generative AI technology that it says rivals ChatGPT. The technology, called Gemini Pro, has replaced the previous tech that powers the chatbot Bard.
Google said in a blog post that Gemini Pro outperformed GPT-3.5 — which was released in April and powers the free version of ChatGPT by OpenAI — in six out of eight industry-standard benchmarks.
Google says Gemini Pro is “far more capable” than its older AI model at performing such tasks as “understanding, summarizing, reasoning, coding, and planning.”
The tech has gotten criticism over the past couple of days, however, with users posting on social media about significant errors in some of Bard's answers to straightforward questions. The fact that Google admitted to faking a demo of the Gemini tech drew more criticism.
But, let’s see how the new version of Bard performs on tasks for travel.
In September, we tested Bard for travel shortly after it added several extensions to access real-time data through Google products: Maps, Flights, Hotels, YouTube, and Workspace, which includes Gmail, Docs, and Drive.
Spoiler: It's not a stretch to say that Bard is actually useful in some cases, but the experimental tech still has its limits.
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