ABOUT Google announced this Wednesday (10) updates to its AI chatbot, bard. What’s new includes support for new languagessuch as Japanese and Korean, The easiest ways to export texts to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search and dark mode. In addition, the company is removing the waiting list for Bard and make the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. It also promises future features like AI image creation in collaboration with Adobe and integration with third-party services like Instacart and OpenTable.

The chatbot was launched two months ago for select users in the US and UK. While still considered an experiment rather than a replacement for the company’s search engine, Bard is compared unfavorably to competitors such as ChatGPTfrom OpenAIand a new chatbot from bingfrom Microsoft.

Notably, Bard made a factual error in his first public demonstration (although this issue is common to all of these robots). Google is now adding a lot of features and updating Bard to use their new PaLM 2 language model, which should improve its overall responses and usability.

Google claims that the new Bard is particularly good at handling coding requests, including debugging and explaining code snippets in over 20 languages, so some of today’s updates are focused on that use case.

These updates include a dark mode, improvements to code quoting (which will not only suggest sources but also explain snippets), and a new export button. It can already be used to submit code to the Google Colab platform, but will now also work with another browser-based IDE, Replit (starting with Python Requests).

Using images in search

For more general use, Google is making Bard more visual, with the ability to parse images, suggest images in query results, and generate AI-assisted visuals (a feature coming “in the coming months” with Adobe’s Firefly software).

Visual results will appear in Bard just like some Google queries. The company leads by example by asking, “What are the must-see attractions in New Orleans?” with a system that generates a list of relevant places such as the French Quarter and the Audubon Zoo, illustrated with photos you would get from a typical Google image search.

A more interesting feature is the ability to start the system with an image. This works on Google Lens, which is capable of identifying objects in images. Google gives an example of uploading a photo of your dogs along with the phrase “write a funny caption about these two.” Google Lens defines dog breeds, and Bard writes something related to their characteristics. It’s a little tricky to understand, but it can have a lot of creativity, depending on how the system is integrated.

Google says it will soon integrate Firefly, Adobe’s artificial intelligence imaging tool, into Bard. This is notable because Adobe is selling Firefly for the “ethical nature” of its training data (a criticism that has led to lawsuits against other AI imaging tools). It will also be the first of many third-party integrations for Bard (which Google calls “tools”), and the company promises that the system will soon connect directly to “Google apps and amazing services on the web.”

AI war

While Google is catching up, it’s notable that it maintains feature parity with its competitors. In March, Microsoft added AI visualization based on the OpenAI DALL-E system to Bing, while OpenAI and Microsoft are exploring how to integrate chatbots into the wider web.

OpenAI first announced this feature for ChatGPT earlier this year, giving examples of using the bot to book a restaurant via OpenTable or order food delivery via Instacart. Google claims to work with exactly the same services.

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Source: Google

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