Google I/O is underway, and there’s a flurry of AI news to kick things off. Most importantly,Google Bardis now available much more widely, with its waitlist out the window. It is also available in more languages, with a dark theme, and deep integration with Google services likes Lens. Here’s everything new with Bard, as revealed at I/O.
For a while ourbiggest gripewith Bard was its limited geographic availability, and a waitlist before you could take the conversational AI for a spin. At I/O, GoogleannouncedBard is now available in 180 countries and regions, sans the waitlist. Additional language support is coming as well, with Korean and Japanese for starters. The company also plans to expand further, complete with support for 40 more languages down the road.
It wasn’t too long ago that Bard struggled with logic and mathematics. Googlefixed that recentlyby fusing a dedicated logical and math-focused AI model with the conversational model Bard is reliant on. Now, Bard can code too — especially well in Python. It can generate code from a prompt for an application, as Google showed with a Python code for a chess move. When the code is borrowed, you’ll now see detailed citations. Like with usual textual results, you may refine, expand, and optimize the code with a few taps. Once your code is ready, Google now supports exporting the code easily.
Besides this, Bard now tightly integrates with Google apps. For instance, the power ofGoogle Lens— reverse image search — is coming to Bard in the coming months. You could also use the AI to caption your next Instagram post featuring your doggos. Bard can also show you visual representations of your query results, like all the colleges you could apply to pinned on Maps. Then, the data can move to a neat Sheets file, and be sorted by whether the schools are public or private. You could even use prompts to create Sheets presentations, and then flesh out speaker notes from the generated slides.
These applications are merely a reiteration ofBard’s ever-improving integration with Workspaceutilities. Support for third-party service integrations in the pipeline, and Google has named existing partners like Walmart, InstaCart, Khan Academy, and Adobe Firefly. The latter could support image creation from scratch, with AI doing everything for you.
Lastly, Google Bard now has a dark mode UI, which will follow your device system theme, or can be forced manually. It will be exciting to take these improvements for a spin, and to watch how the AI evolves in the future.
