Bard is the perpetual also-ran among the ‘Big Three’ AI chatbots. But Google can dream, as reported by Reuters:

Google’s (GOOGL.O) experimental chatbot Bard is a path to developing another product with two billion users, a director said on Thursday at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York…

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

The way consumers gather information may be evolving. 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.

Krawczyk said his mandate is to improve Bard’s helpfulness rather than sweat chances for monetization like a subscription model or ads, opportunities that may present themselves. Retention has varied over time with the introduction of faster and double-checked responses, he said.

One billion devices may have access to Bard – but how many folks are using it? That’s a figure it’s likely Google does not want to share publicly.

Read the article here.