Google now offers AI chatbot Bard in Hebrew, with new features

By ToI Staff and AP 13 July 2023, 2:48 pm

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Google is broadening the scope of its AI chatbot Bard, now offering the service is dozens of new languages, including Hebrew.

The company also says it’s adding more features to Bard as it scrambles to keep up with rival Microsoft — which uses OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT service in its Bing search engine — in the race to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence technology that has captured worldwide attention.

Google launched Bard in February, but its planned rollout last month in the European Union was delayed as regulators checked whether the service complied with the 27-nation bloc’s strict privacy rules. The company said it has “proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators.”

The Irish Data Protection Commission, Google’s main EU privacy watchdog, said it sent the internet search giant a detailed list of questions seeking more information.

As a result, Google hit pause and “made a number of changes” ahead of today’s European launch, ”in particular increased transparency and changes to controls for users,” the watchdog said.

Google details the improvements in a blog post, which says Bard can now be used in more than 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish.

Users also can tailor the tone and style of Bard’s replies and ask it to read out responses, which Google says is “helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.”

English-language users can now start uploading images along with prompts for Bard to analyze for answers, Google says.