Google has announced several updates around Bard, its collaborative AI, including its availability in over 180 countries and territories including the Philippines. The technology giant made the announcement at its annual I/O developers conference.
Google said it is removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories worldwide including the Philippines — with more coming soon.
Bard is now also available in Japanese and Korean, and the company is on track to support 40 languages soon.
As Google said from the beginning, large language models are still a nascent technology with known limitations. So as the company further expands, Google will continue to maintain its high standards for quality and local nuances while also ensuring adherence to AI Principles.
Google said Bard will become more visual both in its responses and prompts. People will be able to ask it things like, “What are some must-see sights in New Orleans?” — and in addition to text, there will be rich visuals.
There will be images — alongside text — in prompts, allowing people to boost their imagination and creativity in completely new ways.
To make this happen, the power of Google Lens will be integrated right into Bard. For example, if someone wants to have some fun using a photo of his/her/their dogs, they can upload it and prompt Bard to “write a funny caption about these two.” Using Google Lens, Bard will analyze the photo, detect the dogs’ breeds, and draft a few creative captions — all within seconds.
Google also said tt’s imperative to build Bard alongside people, because feedback is key to making it better. As part of that effort, Google is incorporating developers’ feedback into a few key coding upgrades, including the following:
- Source citations: Starting next week, Bard will make citations even more precise. If Bard brings in a block of code or cites other content, just click the annotation and Bard will underline those parts of the response and link to the source.
- Dark theme: This is another feature developers have asked for which will help make interacting with Bard a lot easier on people’s eyes.
- “Export” Button: Coming soon, Google will add the ability to export and run code with its partner Replit, starting with Python.
And since people often ask Bard for a head start drafting emails and documents, Google is also launching two more Export Actions, making it easy to move Bard’s responses right into Gmail and Docs.
Google will introduce new ways to fuel people’s imagination and curiosity by integrating the capabilities of Google apps and familiar services — Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps and others — right into the Bard experience. People will always be in control of their privacy settings when deciding how they want to use these tools and extensions.
Bard will also be able to tap into all kinds of services from across the web, with extensions from outside partners, to allow more possibilities. In the coming months, Google will integrate Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, into Bard. This will make it so it’s easy to transform creative ideas into high-quality images, which can be further edited or added to designs in Adobe Express.
This can be applied in several use cases including planning for kids birthday parties. Planners can ask Bard: “Make an image of a unicorn and a cake at a kids party” — and it will generate an image within seconds.
“We want Bard to be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity — so we’re working to connect Bard with helpful Google apps and many more partners, including Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram and Khan Academy,” Sissie Hsiao, VP and GM, Assistant and Bard at Google, said.
“There’s a lot ahead for Bard — connecting tools from Google and amazing services across the web, to help you do and create anything you can imagine, through a fluid collaboration with our most capable large language models. When we combine human imagination with Bard’s generative AI capabilities, the possibilities are boundless. We can’t wait to see what you create with it,” Hsiao said.
