To catch up with ChatGPT, Google has added an assortment of new features to its Bard chatbot, including the option to have it speak its answer aloud.
If you’re tired of reading answers from Bard, Google added a listen feature to the chatbot, in addition to the microphone input. Click on the speaker icon next to answer, and Bard will read the words out loud. "This is especially helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script,” the company says.
The listen feature can speak in various foreign languages. As part of Thursday’s update, Bard now supports 40 new languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, and Spanish.
Although Bard communicates mainly through text, users can now upload and submit images to the chatbot with your prompt. This means you can ask Bard to identify objects in the uploaded image or ask it to come up with a caption. “This feature is now live in English, and we’ll expand to new languages soon," Google says.
Google may have taken inspiration from Microsoft’s Bing, which incorporated ChatGPT into its AI chatbot and offers various conversation styles. Users can now ask Google’s chatbot to modify its answers using five tonal styles: shorter, longer, simpler, more casual, and more professional.
So if you’re asking Bard to write an email for you, but not happy with the first result, click the “tune” button under the answer. A drop-down menu will show you the different styles; pick one to have Bard customize its answer to fit the selected tone.
The other big announcement is that Google is expanding access to the chatbot to more markets, including Brazil and Europe. Given that the latter has strict laws on processing users’ data, Google published a lengthier privacy policy for Bard to comply with the European Union’s data protection rules. Users can try out the chatbot at bard.google.com.