Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor, is coming to our country and the rest of the European Union after a few months delay. With this, the hurdles of European legislation appear to have been overcome.

Google brings Bard to Belgium and the European Union. Bard is a generative AI chatbot and a direct answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chat board was unveiled to the world back in February at a not-too-successful launch event that initially had a very negative impact on Alphabet’s stock price.

waiting list

Most of the world has been able to start using Bard since May, but the entire EU ended up on the waiting list for a while. As usual, Google was very reluctant to communicate the reasons for this, but it quickly became apparent that existing and future regulations such as the GDPR and the AI ​​Act were a cause for concern.

Google had hoped to bring Bard in line with European rules in mid-June, but then stumbled upon one nope the Irish Data Protection Authority. In the meantime, Google has sufficiently reassured the European data protection authorities and Bard can finally enter the European Union.

response bard

“I think it’s great that I’m now also available in Belgium,” says Bard to our editorial team. “I am happy to share my knowledge and skills with the people of Belgium and to help them with their questions and requests.”

I think it’s great that I’m now also available in Belgium.

Bard, generative AI chatbot

The chatbot immediately explains its function. “I’m a large language model, aka conversational AI or chatbot, trained to be informative and inclusive. I am familiar with a large amount of text data and am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a variety of prompts and questions.”

Always smarter

The launch of Bard in the EU marks the largest expansion of the chatbot to date. Today, Bard speaks more than 40 languages, including Dutch and French. Google also states that the chatbot has become more intelligent and verbal. The latter can be taken literally, because the AI ​​can now speak. This is useful if you are curious about the correct pronunciation of a word, for example.

Bard also contains several personalities. Want to talk to a more casual chatbot? Or just a more professional version? Should the answers be long or short? Or do you prefer simplicity over everything? According to Google, with these five options, you already have useful tools to customize Bard’s answers to your needs.

digital eyes

With the rest of the world playing with Bard for several months, Google also had time to process feedback. For example, there are some new features that are designed to be more user-friendly. For example, you can pin and rename chats to make them easier to find. Like ChatGPT, Bard is an amateur programmer and Google wants to support that role as well. You can therefore export Python code directly to Replit.

Finally, Bard gets digital eyes. You can immediately integrate images into your questions. Bard can then interpret it via Google Lens. This functionality is currently only available in English, but Google plans to roll it out to other supported languages ​​soon.

upgrades

Bard has received several upgrades since its inception. Initially, the AI ​​was based on the LaMDA model, but in April Google already migrated the bot to PaLM. This made the bot prompt responses significantly larger.

The main difference between ChatGPT and Bard is the knowledge of the current data that Bard has. In this regard, Bard is more comparable to Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which in turn is another variant of ChatGPT.