Google Bard AI available in India: How to access, upcoming features, and all you need to know

Google hosted its much-awaited annual event, the Google I/O on May 10. The tech giant announced 25 new Google products and features powered by PaLM 2, its state-of-the-art language model. Apart from this, Google’s team also shed some light on the future of its AI-powered chatbot, Bard, that was launched in February this year. With time, Bard will get some major upgrades and will be more ‘visual’ in its responses. Moreover, the AI chatbot is now open for all and in India as well, you can access Google Bard.

Here is all you need to know about how to access Google Bard, the features that will roll out in the future, its focus on being more ‘visual’, and more.

Google Bard available in India: How to access

Bard is now available in more than 180 countries and territories, including India.

The official blog post by Google highlighting Bard’s availability reads, “As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories, including India — with more coming soon.”

In order to access Bard, you can head over to bard.google.com. You will then see a message saying that the chatbot is still being tested along with an option that says ‘Try Bard’. Click on the ‘Try Bard’ option and accept the company’s privacy policy. That’s all! Bard will be available to you for use and you can start exploring the chatbot.

Bard is still in its experimentation phase and the same is cautioned by Google. A small message, right below the prompt bar, reads, “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”

Additionally, Bard will also be available in more languages. The AI chatbot is already available in Japanese and Korean, and the company is ‘on track to support 40 more languages soon’.

Google Bard upcoming features

During the Google I/O event, we also got a glimpse of what all Bard could do in future. One of the features announced was that Bard will focus more on being ‘visual’ with its responses. This means that in the future, if you ask Bard things like ‘Best places to visit in Delhi’ or ‘Best restaurants in XYZ area’, the AI chatbot will also include images in its response in addition to text.

“ In addition to text, you’ll get a helpful response along with rich visuals to give you a much better sense of what you’re exploring,” Google’s official blog post about Bard reads.

Also, users will be able to include images in their prompts along with text. This will be done by combining Google Lens with Bard.

Giving an instance of how this will work, the blog post by Google reads, “Let’s say you want to have some fun using a photo of your dogs. You can upload it and prompt Bard to “write a funny caption about these two.” Using Google Lens, Bard will analyze the photo, detect the dogs’ breeds, and draft a few creative captions — all within seconds.”

Apart from this, Bard will also be integrated with Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps and other Google apps. The AI chatbot, working in collaboration with Adobe Firefly, will also be able to generate images.

“Looking ahead, we’ll introduce new ways to fuel your imagination and curiosity by integrating the capabilities of Google apps and services you may already use — Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps and others — right into the Bard experience. And of course, you’ll always be in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these tools and extensions

“Bard will also be able to tap into all kinds of services from across the web, with extensions from outside partners, to let you do things never before possible. In the coming months, we’ll integrate Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, into Bard so you can easily and quickly turn your own creative ideas into high-quality images, which you can then edit further or add to your designs in Adobe Express,” Google’s blog post read.