Google's Bard chatbot now has a voice and launches in the EU

Google is also adding new features to its ChatGPT competitor. Bard is now also available in many EU countries.

Bard has not always been able to keep up with ChatGPT's capabilities in recent months. For example, it took Google a while to get Bard coding. But now Bard seems to be ahead in some disciplines.

OpenAI demonstrated the ability to feed images to the chatbot when it unveiled GPT-4, but has not yet rolled it out broadly. If users need this feature, however, they can now find it in Google Bard. Based on Google Lens, text prompts (initially in English only) can be combined with images.

Other new features for Google Bard are:

• Have answers read aloud
• Easily customize responses, such as longer, shorter, or a different tone, like business-speak or more casual
• Pin and rename conversations
• Export Python code to Google Colab and Replit
• Share chats via URL

While Bard supported only English at launch, with Japanese and Korean added after I/O, it is now much more polyglot, with a total of 46 languages.

Bard launched in 180 countries, but not the EU

With the new features, Google is also bringing Bard to more countries. About five months after launching in closed beta in the U.S., Bard is now available in many European Union countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

The delay in the Bard rollout in the EU was presumably triggered by the General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO). In mid-June, it became known that Google was in talks with EU data protection officials. The results of these talks have not yet been made public.

Bard can be accessed via bard.google.com.