Google has announced the global availability of its AI Chatbot, Bard, in over 180 countries without a waitlist. Bard is receiving upgrades to its abilities, including support for Japanese and Korean, new add-ons to expand its capabilities, and visual responses to queries. Additionally, Bard is getting an upgrade under the hood with Google’s new PaLM 2 interface, which provides advanced math and reasoning skills and better coding capabilities.
Google plans to integrate Google Lens into Bard, which will allow users to upload images with their prompts. Bard will analyze the image, identify its contents, and create captions or responses based on the image’s composition. Furthermore, improvements to Bard will benefit software developers, including an export button for code execution in Colab or Replit and citation for code Bard provides. Bard will even support a dark theme, and Google plans to integrate features from other apps to make Bard’s user experience more convenient.
Google is working to expand Bard’s capabilities by partnering with service providers such as Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram, and Khan Academy to build extensions. Extensions will allow the chatbot to access external resources, and Google showed an example of an extension generating images of unicorns using Adobe Firefly AI image synthesis model. Furthermore, users can export Bard’s responses directly to Gmail or Docs, saving copy-and-paste time.
According to Google, the goal is to integrate generative AI into everything and make Bard more accessible. Currently, Bard is available in English globally, but not yet in Canada or much of Europe. However, Google is actively working to expand Bard’s availability across the globe, and users can access Bard today with a Google account at bard.google.com.
“We believe Bard will be an essential tool for users, and developers, as its abilities continue to evolve,” said Google in a statement. “Bard’s technology will create a more convenient and personalized user experience that will be an indispensable tool across various industries.”
