Google tapping the Pixel and Nest brands to invite people to Bard

Following this morning’s expansion, Google is heavily using its Pixel, Nest, and other consumer-facing brands to invite people to use Bard.

Approximately 90 minutes after Google announced it was opening up access to Bard, Pixel owners received a “You’re invited to try Bard, an early experiment by Google” email. This is in addition to reaching out to Superfans yesterday.

The company also tapped the Nest mailing list for a similar invite. These messages place Google’s logos/wordmarks for Pixel/Nest and Bard side-by-side.

We’d like to offer you the opportunity to be among the first to sign up for the new experience and provide feedback.

Google One subscribers received a similar email later on in the day, with that invite being more direct:

Because you’re a Google One member, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to be among the first to sign up for the new Bard experience and provide feedback.

Generative AI is a company-wide focus, and I can’t quite remember the last time Google used email lists of other products to get users to try an experimental service.

• Google has tasked the Assistant team to work on Bard

Of course, the likely reason Google is pushing so hard is to get training data and wide-reaching feedback as it works to compete with ChatGPT, Bing, and various other services.

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see how Google gates more mature features that are closer to launch. It does have a history of rolling out AI features to Pixel phones first. For example, the Pixel 3 was the first to get Smart Compose in Gmail.

We previously speculated that offering early access to generative AI features via Google One could make for a nice perk. More interesting would be if some features outright required Google One to use. After all, the $9.99/2TB+ tier already includes “Google Workspace Premium” for longer Meet calls. Google could easily make Workspace’s generative AI features paid for personal Gmail accounts since they have a real processing cost to them.