ChatGPT shook up industries from education and travel to real estate and marketing following its launch in November 2022, for its ability to generate text that is indistinguishable from human-written text based on questions or prompts from a user.
Microsoft added ChatGPT’s capabilities to its Bing search engine in February, allowing users to generate text based on real-time information on the Web. Bard, which made a limited release in March, works similarly.
That same month, Microsoft announced 365 Copilot, a new AI tool that users can tap to draft e-mails and summarise long e-mail threads in Outlook, create PowerPoint presentations, and manage Excel spreadsheets. It is being trialled by partners before its public release.
Google on Thursday also announced the general release of a new and improved Bard to more than 180 countries, bringing an end to its wait list for access.
The chatbot can now understand Japanese and Korean, and will add support for 40 other languages soon.
Equipped with Google Lens, Bard can analyse images that users paste into their search prompts to help identify objects or generate content, like a creative caption based on an uploaded picture.
It will soon include images in its responses, such as pictures of locations suggested if tasked to create a travel itinerary.
Adobe Firefly will soon be integrated into Bard to allow text to be instantly turned into images. Firefly is Adobe’s AI image generator that joins a growing suite of image generative tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
