Google’s parent company Alphabet has began testing its artificial intelligence service, Bard, before making it widely available to the public this year.

Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has said Bard will be powered by its next-generation large language model it developed two years ago dubbed Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA).

“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks,” said Pichai.

Pichai says Bard will first be available on its Google Search service before being rolled out to other services.

The launch of Bard on Search is expected to rival Microsoft’s ChatGPT which is set to be available on its search engine, Bing.

AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner,” he said.

“These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon,” Pichai added.

Google also back its AI service to help developers innovate by creating a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.

“Next month, we’ll start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow,” stated Pichai.

Google also plans to avail Google Cloud through partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai and Athropic to help developers build reliable and trustworthy AI systems.