Google on Thursday announced the launch of Bard, its artificial intelligence tool that competes with ChatGPT, in around fifty new countries including the European Union and Brazil, which has so far been avoided for regulatory reasons.
“Bard is now available in most countries around the world and in the most commonly spoken languages,” said the American giant in a blog post that unveiled the tool in February in response to OpenAI’s flagship software, ChatGPT. Mainly funded by Microsoft.
“We have been proactively working with experts, policymakers and regulators to drive this expansion,” Google said.
The delayed launch of Bard in the EU has been interpreted by Google as a precautionary measure given Brussels’ desire to regulate artificial intelligence algorithms, which raise many fears of privacy, misinformation or respect for intellectual property.
In Brazil, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) launched a communications campaign earlier this year against a plan to regulate online content.
Previously trilingual (English, Japanese, and Korean), Bard will now be able to speak in about forty languages, including Arabic, German, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Hindi, according to Google.
They can also formulate their answers verbally, adjust the style of their answers in professional or informal language, or extract information from an image.
Finally it will be possible to continue old conversations with artificial intelligence, a feature already available on ChatGPT.
Conversational robots, presented as an alternative to traditional online research, have seen meteoric success since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. They are even integrated with the Bing search engine and other tools from the American giant Microsoft, which finances the Californian start-up.
To stay in the game, Google had to speed up its own AI ads. Its boss Sundar Pichai announced in May new features for the search engine and for the suite of online services (Maps, Gmail, Docs) that allow users to interact directly with the company’s language model called PaLM. 2.
The two competitors use advertising to compete for a stated goal: their platforms, which are equipped with generative AI, should become the users’ preferred personal assistants.