Friday, April 21st 2023

Google Bard AI Chatbot Smart Enough to Assist in Software Coding

Alphabet Incorporated's Google AI division has today revealed a planned update for its Bard conversational artificial intelligence chatbot. The experimental generative artificial intelligence software application will become capable of assisting people in the writing of computer code - the American multinational technology company hopes that Bard will be of great to help in the area of software development. Paige Bailey, a group product manager at Google Research has introduced the upcoming changes: "Since we launched Bard, our experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI, coding has been one of the top requests we've received from our users. As a product lead in Google Research - and a passionate engineer who still programs every day - I'm excited that today we're updating Bard to include that capability."

The Bard chatbot was made available, on a trial basis, to users in the USA and UK last month. Google's AI team is reported to be under great pressure to advance the Bard chatbot into a suitably powerful state in order to compete with its closest rival - Microsoft Corporation. The Seattle-based giant has invested heavily into Open AI's industry leading ChatGPT application. Google's latest volley against its rivals shows that Bard's has become very sophisticated - so much so that the app is able to chew through a variety of programming languages. Bailey outlines these features in the company's latest blog: "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab - no copy and paste required." Critics of AI-driven large language models have posited that the technology could potentially eliminate humans from the job market - it will be interesting to observe the coder community's reaction to Google marketing of Bard as a helpful tool in software development.
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