Google's AI chatbot 'Bard' boosts logical and reasoning skills for smarter conversations

Google has made enhancements to its AI chatbot, Bard, which makes it smarter in understanding and reasoning. The tech giant has introduced a new technique it uses dubbed "implicit code execution," which helps Bard recognise and execute computer instructions without clearly being told to do so, via their blogpost on Wednesday.

This means Bard can now understand and respond to questions involving code more effectively. Adding more to the blog, the tech giant said that "Our new method allows Bard to generate and execute code to boost its reasoning and math abilities.

This approach takes inspiration from a well-studied dichotomy in human intelligence, notably covered in Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'—The separation of 'System 1' and 'System 2' thinking.

Bard is getting better at mathematical tasks, coding questions and string manipulation — plus, it has a new export action to Google Sheets. Learn more. https://t.co/AaXMkVkjgp

— Google (@Google) June 7, 2023

Improved logical and reasoning skills, but how?

Google further in its blog post explained how the company is going to improve the logical and reasoning skills of ‘Bard’. This new approach takes inspiration from a well-studied separation of human intelligence, primarily covered in Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. The separation of System1(fast) and System2(slow).

How is it going to work?

The latest update has merged the strengths of two types of thinking to make Bard's answers more accurate.

System 1 thinking, which is fast and intuitive, is represented by large language models like Bard.

System 2 thinking, which is slower and more deliberate, is similar to traditional code.

By combining these two approaches, Bard can provide better responses by quickly using its pre-trained knowledge and carefully considering the information it receives. "We've seen this method improve the accuracy of Bard's responses to computation-based word and math problems in our internal challenge datasets by approximately 30 percent," the tech giant said.

Also, as per the company announcement, Bard now offers a new export option for Google Sheets. With this new feature, tables created with the help of Bard’s response can now be directly exported into sheets.