Google’s AI chatbot Bard gets an upgrade with Gemini

Google Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot, is getting an update that Google claims will enhance its capabilities. Bard will now be powered by Gemini, the company’s advanced AI model, giving the chatbot more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and other capabilities.

Gemini comes in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nano, and will be run on anything ranging from mobile devices to data centres.

The AI model will be rolled out to Bard over two phases. Initially, Bard will be upgraded with a specifically tuned version of Gemini Pro. It will first become available in English in more than 170 countries and territories worldwide, with more languages and countries, including the EU and U.K., soon.

Next year, the company will introduce Bard Advanced, giving users access to the AI model, starting with Gemini Ultra.

The improvements will make the AI chatbot more capable in terms of things like understanding and summarizing content, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning, the company notes.

“This is the biggest single quality improvement of Bard since we’ve launched,” said Sissie Hsiao, VP and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, when introducing the Bard upgrade in a press briefing.

Gemini Pro will first power text-based prompts in Bard to start, but it will expand to multimodal support, meaning texts and images or other modalities, in the coming months.

In 2024, Bard Advanced will debut, powered by Gemini’s capable model. Gemini Ultra can understand and act on different types of information, including text, images, audio, video and code, and it has multimodal reasoning capabilities. Gemini Ultra can also understand, explain and generate high-quality code in popular programming languages, along with understanding audio and video content. 

The company says it will launch a trusted tester program for Bard Advanced before opening it up more broadly to users early next year. In addition, Google will be putting Bard Advanced through additional safety checks before its launch.