Google Bard launches in India; key details here

ChatGPT rival Google Bard has been launched in more than 180 countries including India, the company announced in its Google I/O 2023 meet on Wednesday. The development comes months after the search engine behemoth launched its flagship Chatbot—'Bard'—in February this year.

"Bard continues to rapidly improve and learn new abilities. And we want to let people around the world try out 'Bard' and share their feedback. So today, we are removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories," says Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager, Google Assistant and Google Bard.

In addition, Google Bard will be available in more languages including Japanese, and Korean. "Many languages responsibly involve deep work to get things like quality and local nuances right. And we are pleased to share that we are on to share 40 languages soon," Hsiao added.

According to the keynote presentation shared on Google I/O 2023, the Indian language 'Bengali' is among the 40 languages where Google Bard will be available.

Google Bard will also be launched in Google Docs and Gmail. According to Hissao, the move will help to easily export Bard responses into Gmail and Docs. The company has also introduced Google tools to Bards including Google Photos and Google Lens. "We are starting with some Google apps that people use every day… In the next few weeks Bard will become more visual both in its responses and props," Hsiao said.

Touted to be a rival of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard is an experimental conversational Google AI service powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA is a powerful AI model that Google first released in May 2021, which works on similar technology as ChatGPT.

How to use Google Bard?

In order to access Google Bard, the users will have to log into bard.google.com, where they will be told that Bard is being tested. The users will then be presented with the option 'Try Bard.' After signing in with the mail id, users will be able to use 'Bard.'  

However, in its discretionary note, the company has said that Google Bard is still in an experimental stage and may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses. "You can help make Bard better by leaving feedback," the note says.

Generative AI in Gmail, Maps and Google Photos

Notably, apart from launching Bard in over 180 countries, the company also introduced generative AI features to Gmail, Google Maps and Google Photos on Wednesday.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google, said that the company has introduced AI-powered features 'Help Me Write' in Gmail, 'Immersive View For Routes' in Google Maps and 'Magic Editor' in Google Photos. The 'Help Me Write' feature in Gmail will have an additional option of 'Elaborate' in Gmail, in order to make the text more comprehensible. The feature will be launched in the next few months, said Pichai.

Meanwhile, 'Immersive View For Routes' feature for Google Maps will be launched later this year in 15 cities including London, Tokyo and San Fransisco. It is an extension of the Immersive feature of Google Maps that the company launched last year. The new feature will help forecast weather conditions for the next hours so that users can plan their schedule accordingly, Pichai said.

Last month, the company combined its two teams DeepMind and Brain into a single focused unit called Google DeepMind in a bid to expand its AI research capabilities.