Google has been making a big push into the world of AI. From Microsoft’s Copilot to a new image-generation chatbot, the company’s bringing a host of changes to its search engine and AI. On its Experiment updates page, Google revealed a major update to Bard that will allow it to add images in its responses. The addition aims to bring ideas to life, make recommendations more persuasive, and enhance responses when you ask for visual information.
Powered by Google’s flagship search engine, the AI is able to find the right images to accompany its text-based responses. To do so, it uses a number of different layers to process the text prompt. The initial layer processes syntax and structure while the subsequent ones create a probability distribution over possible words or phrases that could follow. Bard then selects the most likely answer from this distribution. In this way, it can provide you with a quick and concise answer to an open-ended question such as “What are the best drills for improving my soccer skills?”
The latest update isn’t a huge change, but it’s still an important one. It means that you can now ask Bard for images of particular objects or events. The bot will also show the source of each image it finds, giving you additional context about what you’re asking. This isn’t as helpful as the ability to send images to your friends on Messenger, but it’s a good step in the right direction.
Alongside this, the AI is getting better at providing summaries of articles and information it encounters. The search engine is already able to provide snippets of content and a brief description for articles found in Google Search, so this will only further improve its ability to quickly respond to your questions.
In the future, Google will expand Bard’s capabilities through extensions from other services and third-party developers. In this way, the AI will be able to perform tasks that you normally wouldn’t think to do with a chatbot. For example, you’ll be able to ask the bot to make an invitation or design a logo for a business. It will also be able to generate generative art thanks to a partnership with Adobe’s Firefly, which is an AI that can create stunning images from text descriptions.
If you’re not yet familiar with Google Bard, it’s an open-source virtual assistant that you can use in the Google search app to help with a wide variety of tasks. It can help you with everything from recipe suggestions to finding a restaurant, and it can even write code for you. The AI can also answer questions about sports teams and athletes and provide you with detailed news articles. In addition, you can use it to explain complicated science topics or even create a slideshow of images from the web. Currently, the service is only available in the US and only supports U.S. English, but Google has plans to eventually expand it worldwide.