Google said on Monday that it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard as it races to respond to ChatGPT, which has wowed millions of people since it was unveiled at the end of November.

Google said it would begin testing its new chatbot with a small, private group on Monday before releasing it to the public in the coming weeks. In a blog post, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, also said that the company’s search engine would soon have artificial intelligence features that offered summaries of complex information.

Bard — so named because it is a storyteller, the company said — is based on experimental technology called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, which Google has been testing inside the company and with a limited number of outsiders for several months.

Google is among many companies that have been developing and testing a new type of chatbot that can riff on almost any topic thrown its way. OpenAI, a tiny San Francisco start-up, captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT and set off a race to push this kind of technology into a wide range of products.

The chatbots cannot chat exactly like a human, but they often seem to. And they generate a wide range of digital text that can be repurposed in nearly any context, including tweets, blog posts, term papers, poetry and even computer code.