Google’s AI chatbot Bard gets belated European release

CALIFORNIA – Alphabet’s Google has released its Bard chatbot to users in the European Union and Brazil, and said

the artificial intelligence tool

can now generate responses in more than 40 languages, including Chinese, Hindi and Spanish. 

The EU is among the last parts of the world to get access to Bard, which launched in about 180 countries earlier this year. The delay was due to uncertainty around the AI service’s compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the company said.

But the US tech giant had “very productive conversations with privacy regulators here in Europe”, Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk told reporters ahead of the EU roll-out. “We expect it to be an ongoing dialogue in how we continue to build that transparency, choice and control.”

He said Google will now give users clear notices about how their data are being used and stored, and let them choose not to allow the company’s employees to review conversations, which Google does to understand and improve the product. These control options will be available globally, not just in the EU. 

EU legislation is increasingly slowing down the roll-out of tech products in the bloc.

Meta Platforms has yet to launch

its newest app, Threads

, in the EU’s 27 countries. This is because the company wants more time to work out how the EU will enforce new competition laws that prohibit gatekeepers from combining data between platforms, a person familiar with the matter has said.

Chat services built on large language models have hit roadblocks in Europe before because of existing data protection laws.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT,

for example, was temporarily shut down in Italy over related issues. 

In a company blog post timed to the announcement, Google said other features would also be coming to Bard in some regions, including the ability to hear responses spoken out loud, to upload images with prompts, and to have the AI tool analyse photos. BLOOMBERG