Since early last year, Google Bard has been the company’s flagship generative AI product. However, later in the year, the company unveiled Gemini. Since then, we’ve all wondered how Gemini and Bard were going to coexist. Well, it appears that they simply won’t. According to a new leak, Google might rename Bard to Gemini.
At this point, this isn’t 100% confirmed. So, at this point, we can’t say that Google is changing its name for sure. We’re going off of hints inside of the code and pre-release screenshots. So, you’ll want to take this news cautiously. Anything can change at this point.
Google might rename Bard to Gemini
Ever since Gemini came out, we all wondered what was going to happen to Bard. We wondered the same thing about Google Assistant when Bard came out. And, here we are with three powerful Google AI products. With such tight integration between the three- Google Assistant with Bard and Bard Advanced to name a few- there’s going to have to be some cannibalization going on.
While we can’t confirm this name change, this is something that the company has done before. Google sometimes launches several different similar products under different names and then subsequently streamlines them. So, random name changes should come as no surprise to Google fans.
Hints in the code
X User Bedros Pamboukian posted a thread showing a handful of hints pointing to Google renaming Bard to Gemini. Some of the screenshots show lines of code where Gemini is used instead of Bard. Other screenshots show actual images of products showing the name changes as well.
The first screenshot shows lines of text reading “New document created. Parts of your response may only be available in Gemini” along with other lines of code. The next screenshot shows some code where “Bard Advanced” is accompanied by “Gemini Advance”.
Moving down the line, we have a couple of screenshots showing actual front-end Google products where Gemini is used instead of Bard. We see a screenshot of the “Google Bard” extensions renamed to “Gemini extensions,” the Google Bard- homepage where you can type your prompts- with the text to Gemini, a text bubble saying “Learn how your conversation information is used and what Gemini shares with enabled Extensions by visiting the Gemini privacy help hub”, and a screenshot showing the Remove all links option with Bard changed to Gemini.
So, Bard may have just been a testing dummy
So, it appears that Google might be streamlining its AI affairs. It also appears that, throughout the year 2023, Google may have just been testing the waters. The company released Bard only to release an entirely new and more powerful AI system a few months later. Now, at the very beginning of 2024, not even a year after Bard launched, we’re getting hints that Google is renaming Bard.
We all knew that bringing Bard to the market was very much a hasty and nervous response to ChatGPT. So, Google quickly cobbled together something and presented it to the masses like a child who didn’t have anything prepared for Show-And-Tell. However, the company couldn’t sit around for the entire year while AI companies all moved on without it. The investors would rip it to shreds.
Now that some time has passed, Google is able to make some long-term plans and really create a unified AI experience. This, unfortunately, means that some sacrifices will need to be made. Again we don’t know if Google is going to follow through with this. We’ll just have to wait and see what the company does.
