Ever wished you had a pal to help you create a shopping list for healthy Black-owned food brands, plan an itinerary for your upcoming family vacation and give suggestions on writing that perfectly crafted raise request to your boss? Enter Bard, Google’s foray into the generative AI world, where having an all-encompassing artificial intelligence assistant is just a few keystrokes away.
Jules Walter, a product leader at Google, is on the team spearheading Bard, Google’s latest experiment that lets people collaborate with generative AI. Unlike some platforms that can only pull information up to a set date in the past, Bard’s training data is up to date and is constantly being updated with new information.
Originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Walter has loved technology since he was a kid. “My mom used to tell me how I would open up toys and try to figure out how they work from the inside.” After graduating from MIT and business school, Walter joined a medical device company in West Africa, which only enhanced his interest in tech. “Tech moves fast for companies that have products that touch the lives of billions of people,” he says, and he realized he wanted to play his part in those actions.
Walter joined Google four years ago and became a part of the Bard team. “I’m excited about this product, especially in its infancy, knowing the potential impact that it can have in the long term. We’re already seeing a pretty significant impact on people’s lives.”
Walter sat down with EBONY to share more on how Bard works and how it can become a valuable resource in your life.
EBONY: What is Bard, in your own words?
Jules Walter: Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can help you brainstorm ideas, get creative inspiration or boost your productivity. I think of Bard as a smart friend who has read lots of books and content on the internet. It can recite information that it’s learned in different languages. It can help you understand complex topics, answer questions and generate new ideas. People wanted a more visual experience with Bard, so we built a way for it to analyze photos with Google Lens. You can take a photo of a dish you saw at a party and then ask Bard for the recipe. Bard is connected to Google Apps like Gmail, Maps, YouTube and others for synergy. We know that this technology can have profound implications for society. We’ve taken an approach that is thoughtful and responsible from the get-go as we’re bringing this technology to the world. We are constantly seeking feedback to improve the product and use human input to improve Bard’s responses.
How does Google envision people using Bard in their everyday lives to make their lives in 2024 even better?
How we think about Bard is more like it’s a thought partner. It’s not just a tool to answer questions but also helps you generate possibilities, brainstorm ideas and develop plans for the new year. Bard does things with you instead of doing things for you, unlike many other technologies. You can go to bard.google.com on any browser and very soon, we’ll introduce the Bard mobile app.
What are some examples of Bard in action?
Something that I do when I have ideas that I want to convey to someone else, like a colleague, and I don’t have the right words, I’ll ask Bard to rewrite an email in a way that’s much more nuanced. I write two or three bullet points and within a minute, Bard shares a draft I can edit and adapt.
Jules Walter. Image: Google.
How about using Bard to seek a healthier lifestyle?
People are thinking about creating healthy habits, especially around the New Year. You can ask Bard about healthy eating habits, and it will provide suggestions and possibilities to explore. You can tell Bard to provide more information about your specific goals. I’m a pescatarian, so I would ask for meal plans for people who are pescatarian and like Haitian food. Bard can then adjust its responses to be more helpful for you.
How do Bard and Google protect your privacy and information as it’s learning and growing?
At Google, we’ve always emphasized our responsible approach, especially with technologies like generative AI. When it comes to privacy, we give users control for transparency. From the time that you start using Bard, we tell you upfront that in order to help our products, we may have humans read, review, annotate or process the conversation that you’re putting into Bard. We disconnect the conversation with your Google account before the reviewer sees or annotates that conversation. At any point, you can turn off your Bard activity setting, which means that we don’t use your history to improve the product. In some cases, like when Bard connects with Workspace extensions, we don’t let human reviewers look at that data or use the data to train the model. These are some measures we take to ensure and protect users’ privacy, which is extremely important to us.
How is Bard developing as a platform that speaks to diverse communities?
I firmly believe that we need more people of color in tech to build these products and train these AI models to your point. About 25% of HBCU students are interested in STEM. But then, when you look at the tech industry, we’re not seeing the same levels of representation. That’s why I co-founded two nonprofits that work with universities. We help underrepresented students at those colleges become software engineers and get jobs in tech so that they can be part of building these products. The other nonprofit is called Black Product Managers. The focus is to help professionals become product managers and help them thrive in the industry.
Another thing to think about is that when our communities use these technologies early, we can give feedback and be more influential because the technology hasn’t already been set in a given direction that’s not inclusive of us. Google is making progress there. We’ve done research, and we found that Black people in the US often have a worse experience with automatic speech recognition technology. We’ve partnered with Howard University on a project called Elevate Black Voices to improve speech technology for Black voices. I’m passionate about giving our community access to tech and our voices being considered and influencing important technologies such as AI.
Is AI becoming more human by the minute?
AI is a machine learning model, so it’s not human. It might provide a response that seems so unique that you may wonder if it is, but AI can’t think for itself or feel emotions. It’s just great at picking up patterns known as training. AI can empower, assist and inspire you. It can help you kickstart the creative process, but it’s not there to do the work for you. That’s your role as the creator. AI can and will make mistakes. Always check the information that’s presented as fact. When in doubt, you can double-check it with a Google search.
