Google’s AI chatbot Bard is now available in Swahili

Tech giant Google has announced the expansion of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard to Swahili, the first African language to be included.

Google said Thursday that Bard’s support for Swahili is part of 40 new languages and 59 new countries and territories, describing it as the chatbot’s largest expansion to date.

Bard is now available in the most widely spoken languages, including Swahili, Chinese, German, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish.

Users can now access Bard in their preferred language with text-to-speech also enabled in 8 languages.

“The launch of Bard in Swahili is a major milestone as it allows Bard to reach even more people in Africa, where approximately 150 million people speak Swahili. This makes Bard more accessible to everyone in the region, and we believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool for creativity and learning,” said Rachael Ndichu, Language Manager at Google.

With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili is the third most spoken language in Africa and among the 10 most widely spoken languages in the world.

Other updates in the expansion include listen-to responses which are available in over 40 languages, which will come in handy if a user wants to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.

Users can also now adjust Bard’s responses by changing the tone and style of its responses to five different options: simple, long, short, professional or casual.

Google says this feature is live in English and will expand to new languages in the coming weeks.

Additionally, Bard users can now pin and rename their conversations with the chatbot for easier revisiting of conversations that contain important information or ideas.

Through the export code to more places feature, users can now export Python code to Replit, in addition to Google Colab, making it easier for users to share their code with others or use it in other projects.

At the same time, users will also be able to share responses with friends using shareable links, making it easier to collaborate on projects or get feedback on ideas. One can also upload images with prompts to the chatbot.

Launched in March, Bard is Google’s rival to ChatGPT, the AI chatbot by the Microsoft-backed company OpenAI.

Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc is racing to catch up with Microsoft, which has even integrated ChatGPT-like features in a wide array of its products, including the Bing search engine.

In late May, OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT in smartphones as it continues to encroach the search market which Google massively dominates.