Google’s AI chatbot Bard now available in nine Indian languages

In Google Bard’s latest update, the company announces that the AI chatbot will now be available in 40 new languages and over 230 countries. New features have also been added to its operation.

Google unveiled a host of new features and expanded the availability of its conversational AI chatbot Bard on July 13.

In a blogpost, Amarnag Subramanya, VP-engineering, Bard, and Jack Krawczyk, product lead, Bard, shared that the company’s generative AI offering can now be used in 40 languages.

Out of the 40, nine languages, Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, are of Indian origin. Further, the chatbot is now also available in over 230 countries.

"As we bring Bard to more regions and languages over time, we’ll continue to use our AI Principles as a guide, incorporate user feedback, and take steps to protect people’s privacy and data," the blogpost read.

In the AI chatbot space, ChatGPT still has the biggest active daily users at about 13 million. Google's Bard, which was launched in May 2023, is estimated to have a user base of 1 billion by 2025.

In line with the company’s bid to expand their presence in AI, a bunch of new features have also been added to the bot's services.

Users can now listen to the responses that the it generates in 40 languages by entering a prompt and selecting a newly added sound icon.

They can also control the tone and style in which Bard responds to their prompts. The feature is live in English as of now. One can select out of 5 options, that are, simple, long, short, professional or casual. 

Conversations with the chatbot can also be pinned and renamed now so that users can revisit their prompts later. One can now see options to pin, rename and pick up recent conversations in its sidebar.

Further, the conversations and responses generated by Bard can now also be shared within one’s network now. The feature is live in over 40 languages. 

Google has also integrated the capabilities of Google lens into Bard. Now, users can upload images as prompts and it will churn out responses, like information or description, for it.

This feature is available only in English as of now, but the company plans on expanding it to other languages soon.