Google Bard received a big update, with Google making the generative AI chatbot available in the EU and adding a few neat new features.
Google on Thursday quietly announced a big update for Google Bard, which brings several features to Google’s first ChatGPT rival. Among them is multimodal support, or the ability to use both text and images to obtain answers from the chatbot. Also interesting is Bard’s ability to use voice in its answers, and the expanded support for other languages will also come in handy.
But the reason I’m really excited about Google Bard’s mid-July upgrade is something else entirely. Google Bard is now available in the European Union, which means Google is comfortable enough with the chatbot’s privacy features to release it in a region with much stricter privacy rules than the US.
Better Google Bard privacy?
Google made Bard available worldwide at I/O 2023. But the entire EU block wasn’t part of the rollout. Europeans had to use VPNs to talk to Bard. I can attest that Bard works over VPN, so there were no issues there. But Google refrained from releasing Bard in the region because it feared local privacy laws.
Google addresses privacy concerns in its blog post, saying that it’s working with experts, policymakers, and regulators on this Bard expansion to prioritize user privacy and data:
Starting today, you can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish.
