Google Bard Upgraded to Gemini Pro Globally

Google has announced Bard is now powered by the Gemini Pro model globally, with support for more than 40 languages. Bard is Google’s public, consumer-facing chatbot designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Language support now includes Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Beyond language support, Bard fully supports multimodal inputs and outputs and can also be used for image generation powered by Google’s Imagen2 model.

Bard can be accessed for free by anyone with a Google account at bard.google.com.

Gemini Pro for Bard is a substantial upgrade from prior versions, which utilized Google’s PaLM2 large language model (LLM). Gemini Pro was built from the ground up as a multimodal generative AI model and ranks second only to GPT-4, according to the Large Model Systems Organization.

Image generation now supported with Google Bard

Perhaps one of the most requested features generative AI users were demanding was access to image generation from Google. For almost a year, generative AI gurus have been able to use the likes of OpenAI DALL·E, Adobe Firefly, and Bing Image Creator. But for Google, you’d have to experiment with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.

Bard’s upgrade to Gemini Pro changes that dynamic, and now image generation is easily accessible to all Google users.

Google maintains that any image generation follows its Responsible AI principles and guardrails to ensure that potentially offensive, violent, or sexually explicit content isn’t generated.

While some may groan at the continuous emphasis on AI principles and safety amongst tech, it’s necessary.

In just a few weeks, we’ve seen generative AI tools be used to dissuade voters in New Hampshire with a deepfake voice of President Joe Biden and sexually explicit, pornographic deepfake images of Taylor Swift spread on X.

Disclaimer: The author of this article is a current employee of Google. This article does not represent the views or opinions of his employer and is not meant to be an official statement for Google, Google Cloud, or the Alphabet holding company.