• Google has announced that its Bard generative AI platform now supports Swahili.
• It is the first African language supported by Bard, which was part of a recent expansion that sees the platform now support 40 languages.
• Bard is also available in 59 countries at the time of writing.

In recent weeks Google has looked to expand support for its Bard generative AI platform. Those efforts have seen Bard roll out to 59 countries and support 40 different languages, one of which is Swahili.

Spoken across the African continent, but in particular the East Coast, it also happens to be the first African language that Bard has added support for.

“We’re excited that this is Bard’s largest expansion to date – we see its global availability as a great democratizer of knowledge. That’s why we created Bard: to help you explore that curiosity, augment your imagination and ultimately get your ideas off the ground — not just by answering your questions, but by helping you build on them,” noted Dorothy Ooko, head of Communications and Public Affairs for SSA at Google.

“The launch of Bard in Swahili is a major milestone as it allows Bard to reach even more people in Africa, where approximately 150 million people speak Swahili. This makes Bard more accessible to everyone in the region, and we believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool for creativity and learning. We are excited to see how people in the region use Bard to explore their ideas and discover new things,” added Rachael Ndichu, Language manager at Google, in a press release sent to Hypertext.

Along with the integration of its first African language, Google also highlighted the fact that Bard supports the most widely spoken languages across the world, including Swahili, Chinese, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi.

Added to this is the ability for users to access Bard in their preferred language with text-to-speech also enabled in eight languages.

As such, while ChatGPT is still getting most of the attention, Google has rather quickly made Bard an alternative.

To check out the platform for yourself, and see just how well it can generate responses and content in the newly added languages, head here.

[Image – Photo by Mojahid Mottakin on Unsplash]