Google announced today that its Bard chatbot is now powered by the Gemini Pro model globally with support for more than 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.
In December, Google launched its new generative AI models with flagship Gemini Ultra, “lite” Gemini Pro and Gemini Nano, which is designed to run on devices like the Pixel 8. At the same time, the company updated Bard with Gemini Pro for conversations in English. Google didn’t quantify the improvements but said that the chatbot will be better in terms of understanding and summarizing content, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning.
Bard has gone through a few iterations on the back end. At the time of its original unveiling in February 2023, it was powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications); later in the year it was updated with a new model called PaLM 2; now Bard powered by Gemini Pro will be available in more than 230 countries. Yep, these names and versions are confusing.
