William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, once asked "what's in a name?"
In the case of Alphabet (GOOGL), the answer could leave one open to the slings and arrows of outrageous social media snark.
Google announced a new conversational AI technology on Feb. 6 that the search engine giant said it will open up to public testing "in the coming weeks."
And what, pray, tell, is the name of this new offering?
Why, Bard, of course,
Bard is seen as a rival to ChatGPT, a conversational robot with which humans can converse in natural language. Created by Open AI, ChatGPT was launched on Nov. 30 and is part of what is called generative AI.
Bard is powered by the company’s large language model LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications
"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blogpost. "It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses."
Okay, but while a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, the same may not be said of Bard -- at least on Twitter, anyway.
One commenter noted the bard character in role playing games, declaring that “surely the geeks at Google know that the Bard is KNOWN for being a girly goofy unserious class in RPGs and in some, they are almost USELESS for most tasks.”
"Google stumbling out the gate with the name 'Bard'." one observer tweeted
"Bard? Why not Shakespeare?" another person asked.
"So I guess we won’t be seeing a chat bot with a decent name after all…" another Twitter observer said.
"Name needs work, maybe they can ask ChatGPT3 for suggestions," one tweet said.
"How long before it goes to the Google Graveyard..." another person commented.
"That sounds like a bard idea," one response read.
"OpenAI: Let’s just call it ChatGPT. That has to be the least catchy name possible," another tweet read. "Google: hold my bard."
Google posted softer-than-expected fourth quarter sales on Feb. 3, amid an ongoing pullback in marketing spending from clients around that world and said its recent round of job cuts would produce a multi-billion hit to current quarter earnings.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice and eight states are suing Google seeking to break up the company’s operations in a bid to boost competition and lower prices for advertisers.
