"Bard is now available in most countries around the world and in the most widely spoken languages," Google, which introduced the tool in February to compete with Microsoft's flagship software, said Thursday in a blog post.

"We have been working proactively with experts, policymakers and regulators to drive this expansion," he said.

The US group had to delay the launch of Bard in the EU after questions from the Irish regulator of personal data (the DPC). A worrying signal because its competitor ChatGPT, also accused of not respecting European regulations, had for its part been blocked at the end of March for a month in Italy.

"Google made a number of changes ahead of the launch, in particular improving transparency and changing certain control mechanisms for users," DPC spokesman Graham Doyle said in a statement to AFP.

"Google has agreed to conduct an audit and provide a report to the DPC three months after Bard becomes operational in the EU," he continued.

Artificial intelligence algorithms raise many fears about privacy, disinformation or respect for intellectual property.

Brussels wants to regulate the sector via a text currently under discussion and the European Data Committee has also launched a working group on the subject.

Artificial intelligence: the race for complexity © Valentin RAKOVSKY / AFP/Archives

But pro-AI companies and experts believe these precautions could slow innovation on the continent.

Google also launched its product in Brazil on Thursday, despite a plan to regulate content on the internet that it denounced.

Errors

Trilingual until now (English, Japanese and Korean), Bard can now express himself in forty languages including Arabic, German, Chinese, Spanish, French and Hindi, according to Google.

He will be able to state his answers orally, adapt the style of his answers in professional or informal language, or extract information from an image.

Finally, it will be possible to continue old conversations with artificial intelligence, a feature already available on ChatGPT.

Chatbots, touted as an alternative to traditional online search, have seen runaway success since ChatGPT's release in November 2022. It is even integrated into some tools of the American giant Microsoft, including the Bing search engine.

Chatbots have been a runaway success since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 © OLIVIER MORIN / AFP/Archives

To stay in the race, Google has had to accelerate its own announcements in AI and presented in May its new language model called PaLM 2, which it intends to use in its search engine and its suite of online services (Maps, Gmail, Docs).

The two competitors, followed by a slew of start-ups, compete with announcements with a stated goal: that their platforms equipped with generative AI become the personal assistants of choice, but also of companies.

The global market for generative AI (including text and image generation) could generate $67 billion in revenue in 2023, ten times more before the end of the decade, according to Bloomberg Intelligence and research firm IDC.

These robots, which operate statistically from a gigantic corpus of learning, tend to make mistakes regularly, due to a lack of reasoning skills.

How ChatGPT is trained to answer © us Valentin RAKOVSKY / AFP/Archives

Bard is thus presented as a "creative", "experimental" tool, which "can display inaccurate or shocking information". A warning also present in its competitor.

Their business model is still uncertain, between free for Bard or Bing AI, paid features for ChatGPT or subscription access, while their operating costs are much higher than for a traditional search engine.

© 2023 AFP