Google’s AI-powered Bard now available in Philippines

MANILA, Philippines — Collaborative artificial intelligence program Bard, Google’s response to the hugely popular ChatGPT, is now available in the Philippines.

During the recent I/O developers conference in California, Google announced that it would remove the waitlist to access Bard and make it available to more countries.

“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,” said Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager for Google Assistant and Bard.

“Not just that: Bard is now available in Japanese and Korean, and we’re on track to support 40 languages soon. As we’ve said from the beginning, large language models are still a nascent technology with known limitations. So, as we further expand, we’ll continue to maintain our high standards for quality and local nuances while also ensuring we adhere to our AI Principles,” she added.

According to Hsiao, they plan to make Bard more visual in both its responses and prompts, including allowing users to include images using Google Lens.

Launched in March, Bard uses a conversational AI model that lets users collaborate with generative AI.

“As a creative and helpful collaborator, Bard can supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity and help you bring your ideas to life – whether you want help planning the perfect birthday party and drafting the invitation, creating a pro and con list for a big decision or understanding really complex topics simply,” said Google.

The company stressed that Bard is still experimental and that some of the responses may be inaccurate.

“With your feedback, Bard is getting better every day. Before Bard launched publicly, thousands of testers were involved to provide feedback to help Bard improve its quality, safety and accuracy,” said Google.

“Accelerating people’s ideas with generative AI is truly exciting, but it’s still early days, and Bard is an experiment. While Bard has built-in safety controls and clear mechanisms for feedback in line with our AI Principles, be aware that it may display inaccurate information or offensive statements,” it added.

Collaborative AI, particularly ChatGPT, gained global attention for its detailed responses to questions on various topics. While seen as a useful tool, many have also voiced concerns regarding the future of AI.

Academic institutions, for instance, have started crafting rules and held discussions to take into account the emergence of AI-written research and papers.

Aside from updates on Bard, Google also announced over 100 product updates and features across its platforms, including those related to AI.