Google has notified the world about its AI chatbot, Bard, getting a wider release and new features—with a rollout across Europe (27 territories), plus the addition of Brazil: "Today we're announcing Bard's biggest expansion to date. It's now available in most of the world, and in the most widely spoken languages. And we're launching new features to help you better customize your experience, boost your creativity and get more done." Their updated system is available now, so users "can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages." A spoken response function has been implemented which is advertised as being very "helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script. Simply enter a prompt and select the sound icon to hear Bard's answers."

Jack Krawczyk, Bard Product Lead, and Amarnag Subramanya, Bard's VP of Engineering made sure to mention that Google is covering its bases, since privacy issues have delayed Bard's ability to reach new places (now mostly in the past): "As part of our bold and responsible approach to AI, we've proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators on this expansion. And 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 initial "trial" period was restricted to the USA and UK, when Google launched Bard back in March.

Google made a small but important change to their privacy policy over the weekend that effectively lays claim to anything you post publicly online for use to train their AI models. The original wording of the section of their privacy policy claimed that public data would be used for business purposes, research, and for improving Google Translate services. Now however the section has been updated to read the following:

Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

Further down in the policy text Google has another section which exemplifies the areas of "publicly available" information they seek to scrape,

For example, we may collect information that's publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities. Or, if your business's information appears on a website, we may index and display it on Google services.

Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian psychologist, computer scientist, and 2018 Turing Award winner in deep learning, has departed the Google Brain team after a decade-long tenure. His research on AI and neural networks dating back to the 1980s has helped shape the current landscape of deep learning, neural processing, and artificial intelligence algorithms with direct and indirect contributions over the years. 2012's AlexNet, designed and developed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, formed the modern backbone of computer vision and AI image recognition used today in Generative AI. Hinton joined Google when the company won the bid for the tiny startup he and his two students formed in the months following the reveal of AlexNet. Ilya Sutskever left their cohort at Google in 2015 to become co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI; creators of ChatGPT and one of Google's most prominent competitors.

In an interview with the New York Times Hinton says that he quit his position at Google so that he may speak freely about the risks of AI, and that a part of him regrets his life's work in the field. He said that during his time there Google has acted as a "proper steward" of AI development, and was careful about releasing anything that might be harmful. His viewpoint on the industry shifted within the last year as Microsoft's Bing Chat took shots at Google's core business, the web browser, leading to Google being more reactionary than deliberate in response with Bard. The concern arises that as these companies battle it out for AI supremacy they won't take proper precautions against bad-faith actors using the technologies to flood the internet with false photos, text, and even videos. That the average person would no longer be able to tell what was real, and what was manufactured by AI prompt.

Alphabet Incorporated's Google AI division has today revealed a planned update for its Bard conversational artificial intelligence chatbot. The experimental generative artificial intelligence software application will become capable of assisting people in the writing of computer code - the American multinational technology company hopes that Bard will be of great to help in the area of software development. Paige Bailey, a group product manager at Google Research has introduced the upcoming changes: "Since we launched Bard, our experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI, coding has been one of the top requests we've received from our users. As a product lead in Google Research - and a passionate engineer who still programs every day - I'm excited that today we're updating Bard to include that capability."

The Bard chatbot was made available, on a trial basis, to users in the USA and UK last month. Google's AI team is reported to be under great pressure to advance the Bard chatbot into a suitably powerful state in order to compete with its closest rival - Microsoft Corporation. The Seattle-based giant has invested heavily into Open AI's industry leading ChatGPT application. Google's latest volley against its rivals shows that Bard's has become very sophisticated - so much so that the app is able to chew through a variety of programming languages. Bailey outlines these features in the company's latest blog: "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab - no copy and paste required." Critics of AI-driven large language models have posited that the technology could potentially eliminate humans from the job market - it will be interesting to observe the coder community's reaction to Google marketing of Bard as a helpful tool in software development.

We're starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. We're beginning with the U.S. and the U.K., and will expand to more countries and languages over time. Today we're starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. This follows our announcements from last week as we continue to bring helpful AI experiences to people, businesses and communities.

You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We've learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.