Google’s AI Chatbot ‘Bard’ Will Soon be Available in 180 Countries Including India

During Google’s annual developer conference, known as Google I/O, the company revealed that Bard, its conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot, will be launched in more than 180 countries. This global rollout includes India, and the announcement was made at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

During his keynote speech, Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed his enthusiasm about the advancements in conversational AI, stating, “As models get better and more capable, one of the most exciting opportunities is making them available for people to engage with directly. That’s the opportunity we have with Bard – our experiment for conversational AI.”

Sissie Hsiao, Vice President at Google and General Manager for Google Assistant’s business unit, shared that Bard is now being launched in all these countries, offering users the ability to interact with it in Japanese and Korean. Furthermore, Hsiao mentioned that Bard will soon support an additional 40 languages, expanding its availability and accessibility to a wider user base.

Google’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, is undergoing changes to expand its availability and enhance its learning capabilities. Most of the waitlist restrictions will be lifted, allowing more users to access the chatbot. This move aims to enable Bard to learn from a broader range of individuals by making it widely available in English.

In its initial release, the Google Bard chatbot was limited to users in the UK and the US. However, interested users from India now have the opportunity to join the waitlist for this AI chatbot through the official Google Bard website.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized that Bard is undergoing rapid evolution, highlighting its expanded support for various programming capabilities and its improved proficiency in reasoning and math prompts. He also mentioned that Bard is now fully powered by PaLM 2, a cutting-edge language model.

Google’s latest large language model (LLM), PaLM 2, has been introduced as the powering force behind Google’s updated Bard chat tool. Developers now have access to PaLM 2 through Google’s PaLM API, Firebase, and Colab.

According to Sundar Pichai, PaLM 2 leverages Google’s cutting-edge research and infrastructure advancements. It boasts exceptional capabilities across various tasks and can be easily deployed. Pichai also announced that more than 25 products and features, all powered by PaLM 2, will be launched. The PaLM 2 models, named Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn, offer a wide range of capabilities. Gecko, in particular, is lightweight enough to run on mobile devices even offline.

Pichai highlighted the stronger logic and reasoning abilities of the PaLM 2 models, as well as their comprehensive training on scientific and mathematical topics. Additionally, the models can comprehend over 100 languages. This global reach is expected to assist developers worldwide and facilitate collaboration among colleagues who speak different languages.

In an intriguing development, Google announced its plans to introduce multimodal content to Bard. This means that Bard will be able to provide answers in formats beyond text. Sissie Hsiao mentioned in a company blog post that Bard will soon incorporate rich visuals alongside its responses, allowing users to explore and receive information about various topics in a more immersive and engaging manner.