Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has expanded the availability of its chatbot rival, Bard, to the European Union and Brazil, intensifying the competition among tech firms in the field of artificial intelligence. The rollout of Bard covers 27 EU countries and Brazil, along with support for 40 new languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, and Spanish. Alphabet stated that Bard’s purpose is to stimulate curiosity and imagination, allowing users to explore new possibilities and develop their ideas. The chatbot has been equipped with additional features such as photo uploading, text-to-speech conversion, conversation history retrieval, and chat sharing with friends.
Bard was first introduced by Alphabet in February, initially inviting users in the United States and the United Kingdom to participate in testing the chatbot. The expansion of Bard’s availability comes shortly after Elon Musk announced the launch of xAI, an AI company aimed at challenging OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Musk has criticized OpenAI for alleged biases towards “woke” politics. Meanwhile, Microsoft, a rival to Google, previously invested $10 billion in OpenAI and has been integrating AI capabilities into its products, including the search engine Bing. Additionally, Meta, the owner of Facebook, is reportedly developing a commercial version of its AI model LLaMA to compete with OpenAI and Google.
The field of artificial intelligence continues to witness intense competition as tech companies strive to advance their AI capabilities, expand language support, and deliver innovative solutions to users worldwide.
