Now, you can use Google’s artificial-intelligence chatbot Bard in Arabic, the tech giant said on Thursday as it announced the product’s biggest expansion since it launched in English in March earlier this year.

Bard is designed to enable people to use their creative potential by developing and brainstorming new ideas, learn more about the world by exploring topics from different perspectives, and boost productivity by simplifying and summarising dense content.

Powered by Google’s latest language model ‘PaLM2’ — which has a multilingual understanding of information — Bard can understand questions in over 16 Arabic dialects including Egyptian colloquial Arabic and Saudi colloquial Arabic, and in turn share responses in modern standard Arabic (MSA).

Bard also understands input that includes Arabic and another language in tandem (known as code-switching), and user interface that supports right-to-left script.

Google also announced a set of new features to increase Bard’s accessibility and helpfulness including:

  • Hearing Bard’s responses out loud by clicking on the sound icon
  • Saving, organising and modifying earlier conversations with Bard
  • Sharing Bard’s responses with friends using shareable links
  • Exporting Python code to Replit, an online integrated development environment, in addition to Google Colab, that allows developers to write and execute Python code through the browser, to help developers with coding
  • Bringing the capabilities of Google Lens, a Google product that recognizes and analyses objects, texts & images from the real world, into Bard so people can upload and use images in prompts (available in English only)
  • Changing the tone and style of Bard’s responses; funny, simple, long, short, professional or casual (available in English only)

“We’re excited to give all Arabic speakers the opportunity to experiment and collaborate with Bard, our generative AI experiment that helps people expand their creativity, learning, and productivity. Our engineering team and linguist experts worked together to enhance Bard’s capabilities in Arabic, and that includes Bard’s user interface that supports right-to-left script,” said Najeeb Jarrar, regional director of marketing at Google Mena.

“As part of our bold and responsible approach to AI, we’ve proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and regulators on this expansion. And as we bring Bard to more regions and languages over time, we’ll continue to use our AI Principles as a guide, incorporate user feedback, and take steps to protect people’s privacy and data,” Jack Krawczyk, Director of Product Management at Google, added.

Today, Bard is available in over 40 languages including Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish. It is accessible via desktop and mobile.