Yesterday, Google kicked off its annual developer conference, Google I/O, with a two-hour keynote mostly focused on AI, despite having its maiden foldable device to talk about. The company’s latest generative AI chatbot, Google Bard, was a major talking point at the event. Google announced its expanded geographic availability, but people in the EU still cannot access it. So, what gives?
Since Google started pouring efforts into developing Bard, it limited the test pool to users in the US, that too only by invitation. There was a waitlist you had to sign up for. At I/O, Google announced Bard is rolling out to 180 new countries with support for English, and removing the waitlist completely. Japanese and Korean are also supported now, and other new languages are in the pipeline. However, after Google published the complete list of these 180 countries, it became immediately apparent not a single member of the European Union was on the list, as 9to5Google points out.
Google hasn’t explained itself, but the writing is on the wall — data privacy laws like the GDPR enforced by the EU could be the biggest reason. Google is regularly in and out of hot water in the EU because of its policies conflicting with local regulations. When the company recently said it wants to ensure Bard complies with local regulations before expanding further, it was perhaps alluding to the challenges of taking Bard to the EU.
Using the results of the original US-restricted test, Google found Bard severely messing up responses to logical and mathematical queries. As a result, the company fused a specialized ML model with Bard’s conversational AI to improve its logic abilities. However, a disclaimer below the prompt box on Bard’s website still says it may display “inaccurate or offensive information.” Despite the improvements, perhaps we need to wait for that warning to go away before seeing expansion in the EU.
That said, if you reside in the US or any of the 180 countries where Bard is available, you should take the chatbot for a spin. Even if you’re in the EU, you can spoof your location with a VPN to access the tool. It should be worth the effort considering all the exciting new features coming to Bard in the near future.
