Google incorporates new features in major expansion for Bard AI chatbot

By Onome Amuge.

Google has announced the newest update to its AI chatbot, Bard, featuring innovative updates,designed not only to refine Bard’s linguistic capabilities across various languages and nations but also to introduce integrative features that enhance productivity by bridging Bard with popular Google apps and services, making it the smartest and most capable Bard model yet.

The new upgrades to Bard comprises some key highlights including

Ehancements that elevate Bard’s intuitiveness and creativity and introduction of Bard Extensions, allowing Bard to extract real-time information from platforms such as Maps, YouTube, Hotels, and Flights.

Others are; option to enable Bard to interact with information from users’ Gmail, Docs and Drive to find, summarize and answer questions across personal contents;the ability to collaborate on creative projects, start in one language and seamlessly continue in up to 40+ other languages and countries; as well as features to assist with in-depth coding inquiries and to explore new topics from various perspectives with heightened quality and accuracy.

Google acknowledged that the positive feedback from its users coupled with the updates made to its PaLM2 model have accelerated Bard’s ability to be more intuitive, imaginative, and responsive than ever before in languages and countries all over the world.

The multinational technology firm also noted that reinforcement learning techniques have been applied to make Bard to be more intuitive and imaginative, enabling collaborative  creative projects,multilingual interactions,  in-depth coding assistance, and an expanded topic exploration from different points of view with greater quality and accuracy.

“Learning from feedback, such as thumbs up and down on responses, we’ve applied state of the art Bard. We believe in rapid iteration and bringing the best of Bard to the world. Your feedback has helped unlock the most capable version of Bard yet for stronger collaboration,” Google stated.

As part of its efforts to bring plans to life and easier, Google, with the introduction of Bard extensions,said it is expanding the capabilities of Bard by pulling in information from the Google apps and services.

Based on this development,Bard can now retrieve and help users  work with real time info from Maps, YouTube, Hotels and Flights,pulling together what users need across information sources and bring ideas to life easier and faster.

Dwelling further on the uniqueness of the Bard Extension, Google said, “Now, you can collaborate not only with the world’s information, but also with your own, all in one place, with Bard as your creative partner. With permission, you can enable Bard to interact with information from your Gmail, Docs and Drive so you can find, summarise and answer questions across your personal content. Your Google Workspace data won’t be used to train Bard’s public model and you can disable it at any time.”

Recognising the challenges that come with large language models, Google said it  has integrated Google Search to help users double-check and verify AI-generated responses by clicking on the [G] button to find content that aligns with or contradicts Bard’s statements.

To enhance creative explorations, Google is making it easier for users to build on conversations shared by others. In this light, when someone shares a Bard conversation through Bard’s public link sharing feature, recipients can continue the  conversation and build off of what they started.

Google is also expanding on more popular features now available in all supported languages. With these, users can now  upload images with Google Lens, get Google Search images in responses, and modify Bard’s responses to be simpler, longer, shorter, more professional or more casual in all 40+ supported languages and countries.

According to Google, using images as part of prompts unlocks a new level of creativity, and having images as part of responses can help bring ideas to life.