Google decided to begin the month of February with some new updates to its Bard AI chatbot. One is more support worldwide for its Gemini Pro large language model, which was first announced in December 2023.
While Gemini Pro was added to Bard for English users in December, today"s blog post announces the LLM is now available on Bard in over 40 additional languages. It"s also available in over 230 countries and territories as of today. In addition, Bard"s "double-check" feature, which lets you check the responses it gives with content on the internet, is now available in over 40 languages as of today.
The Bard chatbot can now also create AI artwork in over 40 languages. That"s due to the improved Imagen 2 model. If you type in a request for a social media post about a buffalo wing festival with a "mouthwatering image" in Bard, you might get some AI artwork similar to what you see above.
In a separate blog post about Imagen 2"s upgrade, Google says:
Imagen 2 has been trained on higher-quality, image-description pairings and generates more detailed images that are better aligned with the semantics of people’s language prompts. It’s more accurate than our previous system at processing details, and it’s more capable at capturing nuance — delivering more photorealistic images across a range of styles and use cases.
In addition to Bard, the new Imagen 2 update is the basis for a new Google Labs experiment called ImageFX. While this new tool makes AI art via text prompts like a number of other similar apps, Google says this offers some additional features:
People often discover new ideas through testing a range of prompts and concepts as they iterate. To spur further creativity, ImageFX includes a prompt interface featuring “expressive chips” that let you quickly experiment with adjacent dimensions of your creation and ideas.
We are still waiting for Google to launch the previously announced Bard Advanced, an even more powerful version of its chatbot that will use its Gemini Ultra large language model.