The race among AI chatbots powered by generative AI (GAI) technology is still very much on, particularly between Microsoft’s Bing Chat and Google’s Bard. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has also received significant investment from the former of the two. With this race now heating up, Google has announced a bunch of new capabilities for Bard, including some that bring it close to the competition in terms of feature parity.
In the latest update to Bard, Google has greatly expanded the availability of Bard in terms of accessibility and territories. The chatbot now supports conversation in over 40 languages including Arabic, German, Hindi, and Spanish across 230 countries and territories. Google aims to leverage its AI Principles as its North Star as it navigates privacy laws across the globe and caters to user feedback.
That’s not all, though. There are tons of other great features in tow for this update too. Notably, you can now choose between five different tones for Bard’s responses, namely Shorter, Longer, Simpler, More casual, and More professional. This is similar to the customization options that Bing Chat offers, but it is important to note that while Bing Chat allows you to set a tone for the entirety of the conversation, Bard requires users to customize the tone for each response separately. Moreover, this capability only supports the English language for now and will expand to more languages soon. Additionally, the chatbot can now speak out responses after pressing the sound icon, for those who prefer this method of communication.
In terms of productivity-related improvements, you can now rename and pin conversations to conveniently revisit them at a later point in time. You can also export the Python code generated by Bard directly to Replit now, in addition to Google Colab. Furthermore, you can share responses with friends and even prompt the AI through images. For example, if you want a caption for an image, a description, or more information, you can just upload the image to the chat and ask Bard to perform any of the aforementioned activities. This capability is powered by the technology present in Google Lens.
All of these new features and improvements are available in Google Bard right now, and you can leverage them right here. That said, it is important to note that the large language model-powered chatbot is still labeled as an “Experiment”, so use it at your own risk and do not feed it sensitive or personal information.