Google I/O 2023: Bard is now available in India

Google’s generative artificial intelligence chatbot Bard will now be available in 180 countries and regions including India, with more regions to be added ‘soon’. The announcement was made yesterday at the Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.

In March when the big tech announced the launch of Bard, the access was limited to just the US and the UK. Google then said it would be released in other regions and languages. With yesterday’s announcement, Bard is available now in India, Indonesia, and UAE, among several other countries. Further, apart from English, Bard can also be used in Japanese and Korean.

Along with making it accessible to more regions, Google has also announced that Bard will be moved to its next large language model Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2. As per Google, PaLM is a ‘far more capable large language model’ that offers improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Notably, at the time of its launch, Bard was based on Google’s LaMDA model.

Google also said that Bard will now become more ‘visual’ in its responses and user prompts by integrating Google Lens. It means that users will be able to include images in their own prompts and will be able to generate images using text prompts. This is similar to Microsoft’s Visual ChatGPT which can generate images in response to text and image prompts, launched in March.

Bard will soon become more visual in a couple of helpful ways. #GoogleIO

1️⃣ Bard will incorporate relevant images in its responses. ↓ pic.twitter.com/My6VIBARUg

— Google (@Google) May 10, 2023

Google will also be integrating Bard into Google apps and services like Docs, Drive, Gmail, and Maps. The big tech will integrate extensions like Adobe FireFly into Bard. “We want Bard to be a home for your creativity, productivity, and curiosity — so we’re working to connect Bard with helpful Google apps and many more partners, including Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram, and Khan Academy,’ said Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager, Google Assistant and Bard in a blog.