Many people, including some Google employees, were disappointed with the company"s introduction of its Bard chatbot AI earlier this week. However, development of the conversational bot is continuing. and there"s some evidence that it will expand to more than a Google Search feature.
Updates to the Chromium Gerrit site (via 9to5Google) apparently suggested that Google is adding a feature called "Conversational Search" to its ChromeOS launcher experiments. Specifically, the listing on the site seemingly stated that the experiment was "To evaluate the viability of a conversational search provider as part of launcher search."
9to5Google adds that if that Conversational Search feature is enabled, it replaces the normal search in the ChromeOS launcher with the Bard chatbot AI. It will then appear as its own page on the launcher. Since its article was posted, references to the "Conversational Search" appear to have been removed from the Chromium Gerrit site.
Of course, Google adds experimental code to ChromeOS all the time, and not all of those experiments make it to the final version of the operating system. Still, the fact that code for adding Bard in ChromeOS was put in at some point may show that Google could add the chatbot AI into more than just Google Search. We will have to wait a bit longer to see Google"s full plans for Bard.
Source: Chromium Gerrit via 9to5Google