Google announced on May 10 that it is opening up the company's ChatGPT rival Bard to users in over 180 countries and territories, three months after debuting the chatbot.
This launch comes as the search giant races to incorporate generative AI capabilities across its suite of products amid escalated competition from its Big Tech rival Microsoft and upstart artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI.
Prior to this, the conversational AI service was available to users in the United States and the United Kingdom from March 21 through a waitlist, which has been removed today. Bard will also be available in Japanese and Korean, besides English, with plans to support 40 languages shortly.
"Since we rolled out Bard — initially in the U.S. and the U.K. — we’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback and have adapted quickly to make your experience with it even better," said Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager, Assistant and Bard at Google.
Similar to ChatGPT, Bard will provide detailed answers to user prompts such as "plan a friend’s baby shower", "compare two Oscar-nominated movies," or "get lunch ideas based on what's in your fridge". Last month, Bard also added the ability to help people with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, code debugging, and explanation.
"In the past few weeks, coding has already become one of the most popular things people do with Bard," Hsiao said.
Bard will be powered by PaLM 2, the firm's next generation large language model with improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities that was unveiled at Google's annual developer conference Google I/O on May 10.
Bard to become more visual
Google is also leveraging its visual search capabilities including Google Lens to make Bard more powerful and visual in its responses.
Soon, Bard will display pictures along with text for user queries wherever it is relevant. People will also be able to include images in their prompts and queries. For instance, one can take a picture of their dogs and prompt Bard to “write a funny caption about these two”.
The service will use Google Lens to analyze the photo, detect the dogs’ breeds, and draft a few creative captions within seconds, Hsiao said.
These features come as Google's flagship search business faces its biggest challenge in over a decade from rival Microsoft that is sprucing up its search engine Bing with generative AI capabilities powered by OpenAI's technology. Microsoft has invested a reported $10 billion into the Sam Altman-led firm.
Last month, Alphabet also combined two of its AI research groups - DeepMind and Google Brain - into a single unit called Google DeepMind. The company said this move will help them accelerate their progress in AI and develop more capable AI systems in a safe and responsible manner.
Third-party extensions
Bard also announced plans to add support for third-party extensions in the future, enabling users to tap into these services with the chatbot.
In the coming months, Google will integrate Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models Adobe Firefly into Bard, which will enable users to create high-quality images, which they can further edit or add to their designs in tools such as Adobe Express.
Hsiao said they are working with many more partners such as Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram and Khan Academy among others. This feature comes nearly two months after rival ChatGPT introduced plugins that lets users access third-party services within the chatbot.
That said, Bard will also integrate capabilities of various Google apps and services such as Docs, Drive, and Gmail among others.
Starting today, people will be able to export Bard's responses into Gmail and Docs. For instance, one can ask Bard to write an email invitation for a family function and click the “draft in Gmail” button to make final tweaks and send it to their friends and family.
Bard will also soon add the ability to export and run code on developer platform Replit, starting with Python. Other notable new features include a dark theme option and more precise source citations in a block of code starting next week.
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