Google on Monday announced a new chatbot called “Bard” to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT. 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”

Similar to ChatGPT, which was unveiled by artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI in late November last year, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on huge online databases to provide compelling responses to user prompts.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai stated. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”

The announcement comes as Google’s core product – online search – is widely thought to be facing its most significant risk in recent years. In the two months since its launch, ChatGPT has been used to create essays, songs and lyrics, and to answer a number of questions that could previously have been Googled.

The massive attention given to ChatGPT prompted Google officials to declare a “code red” situation for their search business. Gmail co-creator Paul Buchheit warned in a tweet last year that Google could be just a year or two away from complete disruption due to the rise of artificial intelligence.