To: All Faculty, Students and Staff
From: Ravi Ravishanker, CIO & Associate Provost
Subject: Bard, Google’s Conversational AI system
Bard is Google’s answer to ChatGPT that everyone now is familiar with. It is a conversational artificial intelligence system just like ChatGPT, but there are significant differences in the data that each of these systems use to learn and provide answers. Here are two resources that talk about the differences between the two approaches – “Bard vs. ChatGPT: What’s the difference?” and “ChatGPT vs Google Bard”
Google recently made Bard available to all of us who are Google for Education (also known as Google Workspace) customers. We have configured it to be available to our faculty, students and staff using your Wellesley account, but you need to explicitly opt in to use it (bard.google.com).
Bard is not a part of Google’s core suite of services. Google’s core suite of services have certain privacy protections for data that are different from those Google applications that are outside of the core suite. So, though you can use Wellesley’s email address to sign up, you must agree to terms and conditions that are different from those for core suite. Therefore please read the terms and conditions carefully before signing up for it and if they are not acceptable, you can decide not to sign up to use it. Bard is free to use for now.
If you have already signed up for Bard using your personal email address, there are no clear advantages to also sign up using Wellesley’s email address. However, if you wish to do the same, you need to switch back and forth between the two accounts by clicking on your profile picture on top.
If you have any questions, please send an email to helpdesk@wellesley.edu.
