Google announced today that its "Bard" chatbot is now available globally on the GeminiPro model and supports more than 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.
In December, Google launched new generative AI models, including the flagship Gemini Ultra, a "lite" Gemini Pro, and the Gemini Nano, which is designed to run on devices such as the Pixel 8. At the same time, the company also updated Bard's English dialogue with GeminiPro. Google didn't quantify the improvements, but said the chatbot will be better at understanding and summarizing content, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning.
Bard went through several iterations under the hood. When originally unveiled in February 2023, it featured LaMDA (Language Model for Conversational Applications); later this year, it was updated with a new model called PaLM2; and now, Bard powered by GeminiPro will be available in more than 230 countries with confusing names and versions.
In September, Google launched a "double check" feature that uses Google searches to evaluate whether the results it returns are similar to those generated by Bard. At the time, the feature was only available in English. Now, Google is expanding support to more than 40 languages.
In addition, the search giant also introduced image generation support with the Imagen2 model released in December. Currently, this feature is only available in English. Users can enter queries like "Create an image of a futuristic car" into the chatbot interface.
Google said the images generated by Bard will have the SynthID digital watermark developed by DeepMind embedded in the pixels. However, you have to use Google's tools to identify these images.
In October, Google infused Bard's AI capabilities into Google Assistant so users could do things like plan trips or make grocery lists. In November, Google opened the English version of Bard to teenagers and restricted it to prevent Bard from generating unsafe content, such as illegal or age-restricted substances.