Alphabet (GOOGL.O) announced on Thursday that its artificial-intelligence chatbot, Bard, will be available in Europe and Brazil, marking the product’s largest growth since its February introduction and pitting it against Microsoft (MSFT.O)-backed competition ChatGPT.
Bard and ChatGPT are human-sounding systems that employ generative artificial intelligence to converse with users and respond to a variety of cues. The goods have sparked global interest, but with caution.
Companies have leapt on the AI bandwagon, investing billions in the anticipation of generating significantly more money from advertising and cloud services. Elon Musk, the billionaire, also launched his long-teased artificial-intelligence business xAI earlier this week, with a staff that includes several former engineers from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Google has also now added new features to Bard, which apply worldwide.
“Starting today, you can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish,” Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk said in a blog post.
“Sometimes hearing something out loud can help you approach your idea in a different way … This is especially helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.”
He said users can now change the tone and style of Bard’s responses to either simple, long, short, professional or casual. They can pin or rename conversations, export code to more places and use images in prompts.
Bard’s launch in the EU had been held up by local privacy regulators. Krawczyk said Google had since then met the watchdogs to reassure them on issues relating to transparency, choice and control.
In a briefing with journalists, Amar Subramanya, engineering vice president of Bard, added that users could opt out of their data being collected.
Google has been struck with a new class action lawsuit in the United States for allegedly misusing users’ personal information to train its artificial intelligence system.
Subramanya declined to comment on whether a Bard app was in the works.
“Bard is an experiment,” he explained further. “We want to be bold and responsible.”
Nonetheless, novelty may be fading, as recent Web user statistics show that monthly traffic to ChatGPT’s website and unique visitors fell for the first time ever in June.
