Google launches its Bard chatbot in Europe with a heap of new features as the AI arms race heats up

• Google is making Bard available in the EU, Brazil, and other new territories.
• It's added new features, too. Bard can now read its responses out loud.

Google has announced its Bard AI chatbot is now available in more countries and territories, including Europe and Brazil.

The latest expansion makes Bard available in "most of the world" and in the most widely spoken languages, the company said.

Google has been accelerating its work on Bard as it races against OpenAI's ChatGPT and a raft of other chatbots flooding the market. The company had to postpone the rollout of Bard in Europe after the EU's top data watchdog raised concerns about how Bard would comply with EU data-protection rules.

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In a blog post, Bard's product lead, Jack Krawczyk, and its engineering vice president, Amarnag Subramanya, called the update Bard's "biggest expansion to date" with support for new languages including Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, German, and Hindi.

Google has pushed out several new features as well. For example, Bard can now read its responses aloud, a feature that the company said is supported in 40 languages.

Users can also set the "tone" Bard responds in: simple, long, short, professional, or casual. This will only be available in English to start.

Google said it's added the ability to pin and revisit prompts should you want to pick up a conversation later without starting over. Users can also upload images along with a prompt and have Bard analyze them. For example, you could ask Bard, "Write a silly caption for this picture."

Google's DeepMind unit is busy working on a more advanced large-language model named Gemini, which could make Bard and other generative-AI products more powerful. Meanwhile, competitors show no sign of slowing down. Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI researchers, this week launched its new chatbot model called Claude 2.

OpenAI might want to get its skates on.