Cool, Google’s AI chat, arrives in Spain | technology

Just when the AI ​​race seemed to slow down, Bard, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, arrived in Spain to step on the accelerator again. The tool — which was already working in more than 180 countries after a trial period of several months — is available as of Thursday in 27 countries in the European Union and in Brazil; and in forty new languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. This is the biggest expansion since the technology was introduced in February in response to ChatGPT, the OpenAI product whose success has forced the biggest tech companies to launch their own smart chatbots. “Cool is a tool for increasing imagination. It is a creative collaborator, and it is direct access to a generative AI model powered by the most powerful computer in the world, the human brain,” Google Director of Product Management Jack Krawzyk explained during a press conference yesterday. Wednesday to announce the arrival of the product in Spain and its new features.

The tool has its own URL and user interface, is free, and is offered as an add-on to Google Search, not as a search engine itself. For now, the chatbot is only available in Spanish, though Krawczyk confirmed that work is under way to make other languages ​​available to the peninsula, such as Catalan, Basque and Galician: “For now, Bard can answer in these languages, but we need to train him to answer responsibly.” . In addition to typing, the chatbot is also able to speak Spanish and read responses out loud after clicking on the speaker icon, just like what can already be done with Translate, the popular Google Translator.

This is not the company’s first experiment with artificial intelligence, and in fact it is one of the companies that invest the most time and money in research in this field. The Google Brain division, in cooperation with the British company DeepMind, which was acquired in 2014, is at the top of artificial intelligence globally. Research project adapter And his groundbreaking article, presented in 2017, served as the bedrock upon which the so-called advanced generative AI was formulated.

Last summer, Google developed several AI-related projects, such as the text-based image generators Dall-E2 or Midjourney, that caused some controversy over copyright infringement and the risk of taking work away from illustrators. However, only after bubble Created by ChatGPT —the access bot An Open AI conversational platform capable of answering user questions quickly and seemingly correctly – bigtech I decided to accelerate the development of similar tools.

What can be done with Bard

Like ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, Bard is based on large language models (large language modelsLLM), a type of technology capable of learning and generating answers by analyzing large databases on the Internet. So, Bard can also make mistakes or make things up, and it’s never a good idea to use it without checking your answers.

It is not intended to replace Google’s search engine, the company’s search engine. In fact, it connects to the Google website index so that its responses can include the most recent information published on the Internet, although the sources it includes are not always the most reliable. It is intended as a supplement, another tool for generating ideas, coming up with a rather long story, giving advice on destinations for the next summer trip or summarizing a text, even an audio. “I often wake up in the morning with a lot of ideas in my head. What I do is talk out loud for a few minutes and then ask Bard to arrange my thoughts, summarizing them into three key points,” he gives the Google CEO as an example. The tool has five different options for changing the tone and style of responses: Easy, Long, Short, Professional, or Informal.

One of the biggest differences with ChatGPT — besides the ability to play replies out loud, an option the OpenAI tool doesn’t have — is the ability to export and share files from the company’s other products, such as Gmail email or Google Docs. Among the new functions there is also the option to pin and rename conversations, have several queries at the same time and resume a conversation started at another time.

Another tool that complements the Bard is Google Lens, which lets you upload images to get information about them—like selecting what they represent or writing a description—or asking the chatbot to generate text from it, though that functionality from before The Moment is an available novelty. In English only.

Observance of privacy

Bard’s delay in reaching Spain and other EU countries is partly due to the meteoric and undisciplined career of ChatGPT, the fastest growing product in history. This unprecedented success caught the attention of the European authorities, who showed particular interest in the protection of user data. In June, the European Parliament agreed to negotiate the world’s first artificial intelligence law, with the idea of ​​becoming, by 2026 at the latest, the first region to regulate this technology that, in addition to its great promise, is also frightening because of its potential to change society.

“In a region like Europe, where there are privacy regulations, we don’t think the right way to do that is to ask for forgiveness after this has happened. We think it’s best to talk to regulators to make sure our principles are aligned,” Krawczyk explains. When users interact with Bard, Google collects data such as conversations, location, comments, and usage information. Users can choose how long they want Bard to keep their data: By default, Google stores Bard activity for up to 18 months, but this can be changed to three, 36 months, or off altogether.

You can follow The Country Technology in Facebook And Twitter Or sign up here to receive The weekly newsletter.