During the Google I/O Conference 2023, Google announced that its conversational AI chatbot, Bard, will now be widely available to users. The company lifted the waitlist restriction on Bard, making it accessible to users in 180 countries and territories, including India.
Sissie Hsiao, the VP and general manager of Google Assistant and Bard, shared the news through a blog post, mentioning that the company received valuable feedback since Bard’s initial rollout in the US and UK two months ago. Google has made significant improvements to Bard by migrating it to PaLM 2, a more advanced language model. This upgrade has enabled Bard to develop enhanced math and reasoning skills, as well as coding capabilities.
Google introduced Bard in February, and it was initially launched in a limited capacity in March, competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022.
Expanding Bard’s accessibility, Google has added support for Japanese and Korean languages, with plans to introduce 40 more languages in the near future. Additionally, Bard will now offer visual responses to user queries, further enriching the user experience.
TechCrunch reported on Google’s collaboration with Adobe to enhance Bard’s image generation capabilities. The integration of Adobe Firefly into Bard allows users to transform their ideas into visual representations. By including images alongside text in prompts, users can tap into their imagination and creativity in innovative ways. Google plans to leverage the power of Google Lens to facilitate this feature.
With Bard’s wider availability, Google aims to provide users with an advanced conversational AI chatbot that can assist them in various domains while continuously improving its capabilities and expanding language support.
