On Friday, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced an upcoming update for their AI chatbot, Bard. The update is aimed at assisting individuals in software development by utilizing generative AI to write code. With this move, Google hopes to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI industry.
In an effort to catch up with Microsoft, Google began publicly releasing Bard last month. The release of Bard aims to increase AI use in software development and is in response to ChatGPT’s popularity. ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI and was released last year. The introduction of ChatGPT triggered a race among tech companies to make AI more accessible to users.
Google characterizes Bard as an experiment that facilitates collaboration with generative AI. This technology relies on prior data to generate content, rather than merely identifying it.
According to Google’s recent announcement, Bard will soon be able to write software code in 20 different programming languages, such as Java, C++, and Python. Additionally, Bard will be able to assist users with debugging and explaining code.
Google claims that Bard can optimize code for faster and more efficient performance using simple prompts like “Could you make that code faster?”
A small set of users can access Bard to ask questions instead of using Google’s search tool.
Google publicly released its chatbot, Bard, in late March of this year to catch up with Microsoft in the fast-moving race to advance AI technology. Bard provides users with three different versions of an answer to their query, which they can toggle between.
Additionally, Bard provides a “Google it” button for users who prefer to obtain web results for their query. Google hopes to gather user feedback through the public release of Bard to refine the technology and enhance its capabilities.