Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. It\u2019s also promising future features like AI image generation powered by Adobe and integration with third-party web services like Instacart and OpenTable. <\/p>\n
Collectively, the news is a shot in the arm for Bard, which was released two months ago for select users in the US and UK. The chatbot \u2014 which Google still stresses is an experiment and not a replacement to its search engine \u2014 has compared poorly to rivals like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Microsoft\u2019s new Bing chatbot. Notably, Bard made a factual error in its first-ever public demo (though this problem is common to all such bots). Now, Google is adding a lot<\/em> of new features as well as upgrading Bard to use its new PaLM 2 language model. This should improve its general answers and usability. <\/p> Google says the upgraded Bard is particularly good at tackling coding queries, including debugging\u00a0and explaining chunks of code in more than 20 languages, so some of today\u2019s upgrades are focused on this use case. These include the new dark mode, improved citations for code (which will not only offer sources but also explain the snippets), and a new export button. This can already be used to send code to Google\u2019s Colab platform but will now also work with another browser-based IDE, Replit (starting with Python queries).<\/p>\n For more general uses, Google is making Bard more visual, with the ability to analyze images, offer images in query results, and generate visuals using AI (a feature that\u2019s arriving \u201cin the coming months\u201d powered by Adobe\u2019s Firefly software). <\/p>\n The visual results will appear in Bard the same way they might in some Google queries. The company gives the example of asking \u201cwhat are some must-see sights in New Orleans?\u201d with the system generating a list of relevant locations \u2014\u00a0the French Quarter, the Audubon Zoo, etc. \u2014 illustrated by the sort of pictures you\u2019d get in a typical Google image search. <\/p> A more interesting function is the ability to prompt the system with<\/em> an image. This is powered by Google Lens, which is able to identify objects within pictures. Google gives the example of submitting a photo of your dogs alongside the prompt \u201cwrite a funny caption about these two.\u201d Google Lens identifies the breeds of the dogs, and Bard then writes something relevant to their characteristics. It\u2019s a bit of a tricky feature to unpack, but it could have a lot of creative potential \u2014 depending on how well the system is integrated. <\/p>\n Bard will soon be able to interface with the web, just like ChatGPT<\/p>\n Google says it will also soon be integrating Firefly, Adobe\u2019s AI image generator, into Bard. This is notable because Adobe has marketed Firefly on the \u201cethical\u201d nature of its training data (a criticism that has led to lawsuits launched at other AI image tools). This will also be the first of many third-party integrations for Bard (which Google is calling \u201ctools\u201d) with Google promising the system will soon connect directly to apps \u201cfrom Google and amazing services across the web.\u201d <\/p>\n It\u2019s a sizable addition, but it\u2019s notable that Google is just keeping feature parity with its rivals. Microsoft added AI image generation powered by OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E system to Bing in March, while both OpenAI and Microsoft have been exploring how to integrate chatbots with the wider web. OpenAI first announced this feature for ChatGPT earlier this year, with example use cases of using the bot to book a restaurant through OpenTable or order a grocery delivery through Instacart. Google says it\u2019s working with exactly these same services. <\/p> Although these new features collectively represent a big upgrade for Bard, a more existential question for the service remains: what is Bard even for? Although Google stresses that the bot isn\u2019t a replacement for Search, that doesn\u2019t stop people from using it as such. With Google adding more AI features across its domain, and with changes to Search in the pipeline, is Bard just a playground for the company\u2019s AI ambitions? If so, that might not be a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[93,95,96,81,84,87,90],"class_list":{"0":"post-3434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google-fiber","8":"tag-android-phone-guide","9":"tag-android-phone-news","10":"tag-android-phone-reviews","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-google-guide","13":"tag-google-news","14":"tag-google-reviewsandroid-phone"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5100,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434\/revisions\/5100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}