Google drops waitlist for AI chatbot Bard, English version available

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
11 May 2023 11:13

Google's AI chatbot has been upgraded to expand the English language availability of Bard.

Shown is Google’s Bard website in Glenside, Monday, March 27, 2023 (AFP)

Google lifted the majority of waitlist restrictions and expanded the English language availability of Bard, its generative AI chatbot. The plan is to continue developing the chatbot but with a bigger team, as per the Tech-giant company.

Sissie Hsiao, Vice President, and GM for Assistant and Bard at Google, officially announced the new decision.

"As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories — with more coming soon,” she wrote in a blog post.

At a press conference held in advance of the conference, John Krawczyk, senior product director at Google and one of the leads on Bard, also disclosed that the chatbot would soon be available in Korean and Japanese, in addition to English.

“We’re going to continue to expand to the top 40 languages very soon after IO,” he said.

As a precaution, he added, additional languages are being introduced individually. The business emphasized this throughout the press event as they continued to build the chatbot responsibly. Even Bard is described as an experiment rather than a beta.

In a blog post published in February, Google introduced Bard. By registering on the now-defunct waitlist, it launched publicly for the first time in March when it made Bard available. Bard is a chatbot that will respond to inquiries in natural language, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.