Google Bard will work with images, more apps as company pushes generative AI

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) on Wednesday announced a host of updates for its Bard generative AI chatbot during its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, CA. The software, which is now available to more than 180 countries, will allow you to search and receive responses using images, in multiple languages, and connect to other Google apps.

The software, which is now powered by Google's Pathways Language Model 2, or PaLM 2, will allow you to do things like ask for must-see sights in New Orleans and then provide you with photos of those places. That's a major change from the early version of Bard, which only worked with text.

You'll also be able to upload images and then ask Bard to write captions for them. The company provided and example of a person uploading a photo of her dogs and then have Bard write up a few lines based on how the dogs look.

According to Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager for Google Assistant and Bard, the software's most-used feature is coding. To that end, the company is rolling out the ability to collaborate with code. Hsiao says that the assistant currently understands more than 20 coding languages and is adding more.

Hsiao says Bard will also help users pull together content from multiple sources. In one example, she showed how a student can piece together a college application letter and then find colleges that line up with their specific interests.

Bard can then pull those colleges up in Google Maps to help find their locations and then move all of that information into a table. You can then ask Bard to tell you which schools are public and which are private, and it will automatically add them to the table, which you can then move directly into Google Sheets to collaborate with your family members.

Google’s rival Microsoft (MSFT) is currently leading the generative AI conversation thanks to its debut of its Bing chatbot in February. Google parent Alphabet, however, has been working on generative AI for years, helping to pioneer the technology behind the software.

But Microsoft’s Bing and other generative AI releases, which come as a result of its partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI, have left Google looking flat footed by comparison.

The company is now playing catch up by rolling out a number of new products using generative AI including its Bard chatbot and its generative AI capabilities in its Workspace productivity suite.

By Daniel Howley, tech editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him @DanielHowley

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