Google Bard AI chatbot is now available in India. Here are 5 things you should know

Google has announced new features for its Bard chatbot at the I/O 2023 event. Originally opened to the public in February this year, Bard was only available in the US and UK via a waitlist. Google has now removed the waitlist and opened up access to Bard in more than 180 countries and territories, including India. The tech giant has also made Bard available in Japanese and Korean, and promises to add 40 more languages to the mix.

Also Read: Google Bard now available in India. Here's how to use it

Powered by PaLM 2

Google Bard is now powered by the company's latest language model called PaLM2. The switch to PaLM 2 has brought in some recent improvements in Bard including coding capabilities, advanced math and reasoning skills and more. Google says coding has become one of the most popular things to do with Bard.

Talking about PaLM 2 in a blog post, Google said, "We recently moved Bard to PaLM 2, a far more capable large language model, which has enabled many of our recent improvements — including advanced math and reasoning skills and coding capabilities"

More visuals

Google Bard will soon include capabilities to respond to prompts using images to give users a much better sense of what they are looking for.

Explaining the new changes, Google said, "Coming soon, Bard will become more visual both in its responses and your prompts. You’ll be able to ask it things like, “What are some must-see sights in New Orleans?” — and in addition to text, you’ll get a helpful response along with rich visuals "

Coding upgrades

Google is incorporating developers’ feedback to bring in some upgrades to Bard. The search giant is making source citations more precise, adding support for a dark theme along with the ability to export and run code with our Replit.

Google says Bard has already learned more than 20 programming languages including Python, C++, Go, Java Script, Ruby and even Google Sheets.

Plugin Support 

Similar to GPT-4, Google will bring in support for extensions including Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram and Khan Academy. Google will also be adding capabilities of existing Google apps including Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps, etc to Bard.

Text-to-image generation

Taking the competition to Microsoft's Bing-powered by GPT-4, Google has partnered with Adobe Firefly to allow users to generate images with a single prompt. Notably, Microsoft's new Bing recently gained the ability to generate images using OpenAI's DallE model.