EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES
Finally, the best advice any guide to AI chatbot use can give: when in doubt, ask the bot directly. With Bard, this can be a double-edged sword given its propensity to cheerfully lie about any subject - even when the truth is close at hand! - but asking Bard about best practice for prompting itself can yield interesting results. 

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At the time of writing - and this is highly likely to change in the future - Bard is occasionally advising users that they can use “flags” to modify prompts and set parameters for its responses. If you’re familiar with our guide to Midjourney prompting you will know all about flags already; a commonly used term in programming, they’re simply suffixes you can add to a prompt to set certain parameters for the response.

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Bard is only occasionally advising users of this functionality because it’s technically not supposed to be public, and Google would prefer you to use conversational gambits with LaMDA, not hacker tricks. Nonetheless, they seem to work!

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Simply append the –flag to the end of your prompt to set the parameter. Here’s a selection of options you can try:

-a or --answers: This flag can be used to specify the number of answers that Bard should generate. The default is 1, but you can increase the number to get a variety of options, or decrease it to give Bard a stress headache.
-f or --format: This flag can be used to specify the format of the output. You can specify the format as "markdown", "html", or "plain text", and Bard will do its best to structure its responses in that way. If asking for tabulated data, using the markdown format can be very helpful.
-l or --language: This flag can be used to specify the language that Bard should use. The default is English.
-s or --size: This flag can be used to specify the maximum number of characters in the output. The default is 1000, and the maximum 5000. By altering this parameter you can drastically alter Bard's output! 
-t or --temperature: This flag can be used to specify the temperature of the output. The temperature controls the creativity of the output. A higher temperature will result in more creative output, but it may also result in less coherent output. You can set the temp at anywhere between 0 and 1; the default temperature is 0.5
-c or --category: This flag can be used to specify the "category" of the prompt. Bard lists the available categories as "coding, creative, factual, fun, general, music, news, science, sports, and writing", and these can affect the output in unpredictable ways.
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You can combine these flags for extra control. For example, try these two prompts out and note the difference between the results!

Tell me something I don't know! --size 50 --temperature 0.1 --category factual
Tell me something I don't know! --size 5000 --temperature 1 --category fun
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