Google Announces New Bard Features, Drops Waitlist, Integrates With Workspace
Perhaps Google should call their annual developer conference Google A/I instead of Google I/O. The company is focused on aggressively embracing generative AI this year. Google debuted its latest language model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). It now fully powers Bard, Google’s AI chatbot that rivals his Bing chatbot powered by Microsoft’s ChatGPT.
According to Google, the new PaLM 2 language model has better math, logic and reasoning skills, learning over 20 programming languages including C++, Go, JavaScript, Python, Kotlin and even Google Sheets. So I’m particularly good at coding. Features,” said Sissy Xiao, vice president and general manager of Google Assistant and Bird. Bard can now not only write code, but also explain specific functionality and answer questions about how to fix or improve the code. The resulting code snippets can be sent to her Colab or Replit on Google for easy collaboration. When pulling code from another source, we now also cite that source.
Xiao also said Bird will become “more visual” in both responses and prompts in the coming weeks. This means that bard search results will start returning images for relevant queries, and people can also use the Google Lens integration to prompt bard to “use an image”. It means that Xiao demonstrated this with a photo of two dogs and the prompt “Write a funny caption about these two of him.” So I need to prompt the bard with words in addition to the image (I don’t know what I was thinking, but prompting the bard “with an image” was my In my head it sounded more exciting at first).
Google also plans to work with third parties to add features to Bard such as image generation with text prompts through Bard integration. adobe firefly (opens in new tab)The company called these “tools” and showed graphics with logos from several companies, including Kayak, OpenTable, Tripadvisor, Spotify and Walmart. Finally, Google removed the waiting list, Bard is now available in his 180 countries, and added support for Japanese and Korean prompts.
Duet AI for Google Workspace
Google also demonstrated a new AI-powered toolset for Google Workspace, Google’s suite of productivity apps that includes Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet. It’s now called “Duet AI for Google Workspace” (it’s a toolset, not Workspace). It’s called “Duet AI” because Google envisions users collaborating and AI, just like you are now collaborating with your colleagues and other humans in the Workspace app.
In fact, Google was the first to announce its upcoming Duet AI tool In a March blog postbut most of them — with the exception of the writing assistant tool “Help Me Writing” — are not yet available to the public. You’ll be able to create images, create templates from text prompts in Google Sheets, and create custom backgrounds in Google Meet.
Google also demonstrated a future “Sidekick” panel that can read content and “engage” users with contextual prompts. Her Google Workspace VP and GM, Aparna Pappu, demonstrated the feature in an unfinished fairy tale. Asking Sidekick for help (don’t worry, you won’t be prompted without an invitation) raised some questions about what would happen next.
Most of the new Workspace tools are not yet generally available and will be rolled out selectively over the next few months. If you’re interested in early access to test these features, sign up and Click here for the Google Labs waitlist.
