After a slower start than expected, Bard began to reach cruise speed when Google I/O 2023 took place, the event the company chose to announce that it was expanding to 180 countries (until then it was only available and to a limited extent from the United States and the United Kingdom), the year next to the beginning to add new features . Initially, the European Union was left out of this expansion, as Google wanted to ensure that it fits into the legislation of the common European area. Two months later, when these obligations were fulfilled, Google released the first major update of its chatbot, which this time coincided with its arrival in the countries of the European Union.

However, in this update we were able to verify that new Bard features do not always reach different language versions of the service at the same time. Instead, Google has opted for a progressive rollout, in which features are first released in the English version, and later when they make the leap to expand their reach into other languages. Taking into account both operational costs and the need to evaluate the operation of the new development, This approach is completely understandable.

It was therefore to be expected that the next big Bard update would include some of the features that debuted in July in the English version spread to other languages (or at least part of them) and at the same time the main one will add new features that will renew the cycle we are talking about. So we thought and hoped, and Google and time eventually proved us right.

So as we can read on the official blog of Google Spain, Google has released a new major Bard update, with new features that reach all languages, others that are initially only available for the English version, and a leap from one that was previously only available in the Shakespearean language and that is now internationalized. And be careful because it is exactly one of the most interesting ones from the previous update.

I will start with the second one, which until now is only available for the English version, but now it is available in Spanish. I am of course talking about the possibility of using images during consultations with Bard. For this we can upload images using Google Lens or from PC and also get images from Google search in answers. Multimodal challenges were one of the big innovations of GPT-4, and since then we’ve seen other services move forward to integrate this feature.

Google also presented improvements regarding shared conversationsso if you’re now sharing a conversation you had with Bard with someone else, they can pick up where you left off.

Another very interesting news is that The “Search Google” function has been improvedand now, in its English version, Bard will do a search of its own answer to see if there is information on the Internet that confirms it. This is undoubtedly a tool that makes the verification of answers much easier and makes the service much more reliable.

And finally Google has started releasing the Bard extension, with which it is possible to integrate Google and third-party services into the chatbot. From searching for information in digital assets you store in the cloud to planning trips, extensions expand the service’s usefulness exponentially. Of course, as expected, they are only available for the English version at the moment.