Today, Google announced that it's dropping the waitlist for its AI chatbot Bard, making it more accessible to everyone around the world. It supports new languages, has a new Dark Mode, and it has gotten better at a ton of other things. Google has added a lot of new features to Bard, so let's try to unpack each one of them to see how you can use it as an "experiment" today.

No more waitlist

An image showing an illustration of Google Bard being available in more countries.
Source: Google

Google's AI chatbot Bard is now available in English in 180 countries and territories. This means there's no waitlist and pretty much anyone can try Google's AI chatbot and share their feedback. Bard is also available in Japanese and Korean languages, and Google says it's on track to support as many as 40 languages soon.

Harnessing the power of Google Lens

An image showing two dogs being viewed through Google Lens.
Source: Google

Google noted that Bard is getting better at presenting results with rich visuals. Visual responses are great because they'll allow you to get a better sense of understanding. Notably, you can also include images to your own prompts alongside text. Google showcased this with a picture of dogs and asked Bard to write a funny caption. Bard can essentially use Google Lens to analyze the photo and detect the subjects and pull relevant information or answers to your queries.

Bard gets better at coding

Google says its updated chatbot has gotten better at tackling coding queries. It can now debug and explain codes in more than 20 programming languages, making it a lot more useful and reliable. But Google wanted to make it better at working alongside users, so it decided to collect feedback and bring a ton of improvements. Here are a few key coding upgrades that Google highlighted at the keynote:

  • Dark theme: Unsurprisingly, a lot of developers were asking for a Dark theme, so Google added a simple toggle to make Bard a lot easier on the eyes.
  • Source citations: Bard is getting better at citing the chunks of code it brings in for your queries. You, as an end user, can simply click the annotation to make Bard highlight the blocks of code along with a link to the source.
  • "Export" button: Bard will soon gain the ability to export and run code with Google's partner Replit, starting with Python.

Export text to Google Docs and Gmail

An image showing a Google Bard response with options to export it to gmail or Google Docs.
Source: Google

Turns out, a lot of people were asking Bard to write an email or fill up documents, so Google is making it easier to export Bard's responses with two new Export Actions. The new export button that will appear at the bottom of each response can send that particular chunk of text directly to Gmail or Google Docs. It's a simple feature that'll make things a lot easier for those who use Bard for drafting work emails.

Third-party integration

An image showing a picture of unicorn standing in front of a birthday cake, surrounded by decorations.
Source: Google

In addition to working with Google apps and services like Docs, Drive, Maps, and more, Google says it'll also enable third-party integrations for Bard. That's right, Google will integrate Adobe Firefly — which is Adobe's family of creative generative AI models — into Bard, so users can quickly turn their thoughts into beautiful images. Not just that, but Google is also working with partners like Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, etc., for more integration.

Those are all the new features coming to Bard right now. It'll be interesting to see how it competes with the likes of ChatGPT and Bing Chat, especially with all these new tools at its disposal. We'll share more thoughts on the updated chatbot soon, so stay tuned.