Google Bard makes historic debut in Swahili, the first African language supported
Google is expanding Bard, its conversational AI service, to 40 new languages including Swahili. Swahili becomes the first African language to be included, pushing Bard’s reach to 59 new countries across territories.
New capabilities in the expansion enable users to more fully customize their experiences, foster creativity, and complete more tasks.
With the extension, Bard is now accessible in the majority of the world’s countries, including those in the EU. Bard is now available in most frequently spoken languages such as Swahili, Chinese, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi. Now that text-to-speech is available in eight languages, users can enjoy Bard in their favourite language.
Swahili one of top 10 languages globally
“We’re excited that this is Bard’s largest expansion to date. We see its global availability as a great democratizer of knowledge,” said Dorothy Ooko, Head of Communications and Public Affairs, SSA, Google. “That’s why we created Bard: to help you explore that curiosity, augment your imagination and ultimately get your ideas off the ground — not just by answering your questions, but by helping you build on them. ”
With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili is one of the top ten languages in the world, according to UNESCO. Bard will become more inclusive and secure as a result of feedback from users, Google noted.
“The launch of Bard in Swahili is a major milestone. It allows Bard to reach even more people in Africa, where approximately 150 million people speak Swahili. We believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool for creativity and learning. We are excited to see how people in the region use Bard to explore their ideas and discover new things,” said Rachael Ndichu, Language Manager at Google.
Read also: Sex of markets and the birth of Swahili
New features on Google Bard
The listen to responses feature, which is accessible in over 40 languages as part of the expansion, enables users to hear Bard’s comments once they click the sound icon. This will be useful if they wish to hear a word spoken correctly or hear a poem or play read aloud. It is now possible to change the tone and style of Bard’s responses to one of five options: simple, long, short, professional, or casual. English is the current language for this function, which will soon be available in more.
Google is also introducing four additional features for users to accomplish more. Users may now bookmark and rename their Bard chats. This makes it simpler to refer back to conversations that contain crucial details or concepts later.
Users can now export Python code to Replit in addition to Google Colab using “export code to more places” function. As a result, users will share their work with others or utilize it in other projects in a simpler manner.
Users will also collaborate on projects or gain feedback on ideas by sharing comments with friends using shareable links. The capability to upload photos with prompts to Bard is also available.
Bard aims to bring together the depth of human knowledge with the strength, wit, and originality of Google’s expansive language models, the tech heavyweight noted.
To deliver answers, it uses data from the internet. As an experimental technology, Bard occasionally may respond to user commands incorrectly.
So there is an easy way to do that if a Bard response is unreliable or hazardous, if someone has a problem, or if they simply want to offer feedback.
