Google Will Soon Launch Its Artificial Intelligence Chatbot in Spanish

Google will launch its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Bard, in around 20 languages, including Spanish, in the “coming weeks and months”, but before opening this tool, the technology giant wants to make sure that the product works well and it is safe. The company announced at Google’s annual developer event, Google I/O 2023, that the Bard chatbot, which launched almost 2 months ago and was only accessible by invitation or by waiting list, is open to 180 countries in English.

Also, it opened him up to 2 new languages, Japanese and Korean. “Starting with Japanese and Korean was starting to make our way. We have started with languages in which we believe that Bard can have a really interesting use, where we have seen interest from the communities and where we feel that the language is ready”, explained to EFE TulseeDoshi, director of product management of the team of AI responsible for Google.

In 40 languages

Sissie Hsiao, Google’s vice president and general manager of Google Assistant and Bard, said in her presentation at Google I/O 2023 that “very soon” Bard will be available in “the top 40 languages” around the world, and while Doshi did not specify a date, he did tell EFE that the announcements will be made in the “next weeks and months”. “Since we introduced Bard, we have wanted to launch it in more countries. But we want to do it responsibly, safely and thoughtfully, and that’s what my team is focused on: responsible AI”,Doshi said.

However, since the beginning of this year Google has been in a race to be the AI reference company in clear competition with Microsoft, which this year launched Bing, an AI chatbot powered by GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 technology from Open AI (creators of ChatGPT and DALL-E). Last week, the company created by Bill Gates and directed by Satya Nadella opened Bing to everyone, which is capable of generating text and images in both English and other languages, including Spanish.

Built responsibly from the ground up

Since AI chatbots became popular with the launch of ChatGPT, several experts have expressed their concern about the effects that these tools may have on job stability (due to the risk of job amortization) or misinformation. Doshi stressed that this technology has to be built “responsibly from the ground up”. “We need to build it with the extra security measures, we need to build it with intentionality, we need to build it for dedicated use cases that we think are really valuable”, he noted.

Likewise, Doshi encouraged the most skeptical and those concerned about the effects of this technology to try Bard and then share their assessment with Google. “It is important that we really build a collective understanding of the technology. The current voyage will affect future voyages. And I think bringing accountability now means hopefully we will start to build a path that leads to useful AI”, he concluded.