Bard goes global with support for over 180 countries and new outstanding features. Google is finally suiting up and ready to compete.

Google Gemini, the AI-based language generator tool from Google, is now available for anyone to try, after being previously available by invitation only. The new and improved Bard is available in 180 countries, with support for Korean and Japanese languages, and 40 more languages expected to be added in the future. The changes to Bard are powered by the new PaLM 2 language model, which adds extensions and new programming languages.

The platform now boasts advanced math and reasoning skills, alongside coding capabilities, making it more accessible to users in technical fields. Additionally, Bard's responses and prompts will become more visual, featuring rich visuals to help users better understand and explore their ideas. One exciting update to Bard is its image integration capabilities, with users being able to include images in their prompts, alongside text, and using Google Lens, Bard can analyze a photo and detect what’s in the image, and draft a few potential captions in seconds. This feature is especially helpful for content creators, marketers, and social media managers who need to create captions and descriptions for their visual content.

Developers' feedback has also been incorporated into the new updates, including source citations, dark theme, and the ability to export and run code with Replit. Google has already set live the ability to export to Google Docs and Gmail, and has also introduced new ways to connect to other Google apps, including Google Drive, Google Maps, and more. Additionally, the company announced a partnership with Adobe to bring integration with Adobe Firefly to generate high-quality images, and then users can take these images and edit them in Adobe Express.

With the introduction of the new updates and features, Bard is becoming a more competitive player in the AI collaboration space. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against other popular services like ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, which have had the advantage in terms of features and reliability during the last couple of months. While Bard may have some catching up to do, Google's market position is indisputable and this played an extremely important role for Bard in terms of capturing and adopting new users, so I guess only time will tell how this will play out.