In the world of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is undoubtedly the best known. But Google Bard is hot on its heels, and the bot has just been granted a new ability: the power of speech.
The change was detailed in a Google blog post, which described the update as “Bard’s biggest expansion to date.” It grants Bard not just speech, but the ability to converse in over 40 languages, use images as prompts, and more.
Google’s blog post explains that adding speech to Bard can be helpful “if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.” To hear what the chatbot has to say, you just enter your prompt, wait for the reply, then select the sound icon.
Bard can now speak in over 40 languages and can understand prompts written in those same tongues. The language list includes Arabic, Greek, Spanish, Swahili, and Urdu, as well as many others.
The new features extend beyond giving Bard a voice box. Google says you can now use an image as a prompt, something rivals of Bard have been able to do for a few months. This feature uses Google Lens and is only available in English for now, but Google says it should expand to other languages “soon.”
As well as that, you are now able to tweak the tone of Bard’s responses, with output styles including simple, long, short, professional, or casual. That could provide a bit more flexibility for using Bard in different contexts.
The chatbot also now lets you pin and rename conversations in the Google Bard sidebar, and if you use it to generate code, you can export Python code to the Replit integrated development environment, as well as to Google Colab. Plus, you can now share the chatbot’s responses with friends. All three of these features work in over 40 languages.
Whether or not these new tricks will help Google Bard narrow the gap with ChatGPT remains to be seen. But it’s interesting to observe what AI developers are doing to try to claim dominance in a contest that is increasingly hotting up.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).