Google has rolled out a new update to Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, that brings welcome changes for web publishers.

Jack Krawczyk, a representative from Google, announced The update includes improvements to Bard’s summarization features and an improvement to source content visibility.

These changes aim to make Bard more useful while potentially increasing the reach and impact of the original publishers.

Improvements to summaries

Krawczyk announced that Bard’s latest update focuses on creating even more concise summaries. This is beneficial for users who want to get a quick overview of topics.

“Starting today, we’ve optimized the model to allow for more concise summaries – which is especially helpful when you want to quickly get to the heart of a topic,” Krawczyk said on Twitter.

Greater visibility for source content

Today’s Bard update is a notable development for web publishers and allows users to more easily identify and navigate to the source of information used in an answer.

“We’re also making the sources more useful. For answers with sources, you can now identify the piece of text that matches the source and easily navigate to it,” explains Krawczyk.

This feature is intended to increase the visibility of the source content and could potentially generate more traffic to the original publishers – a welcome benefit.

In total

The step towards more transparency in citing sources also represents an essential step in the responsible use of AI and in the fight against misinformation.

Today’s update follows Google’s announcement at last week’s annual I/O developer conference that included the introduction of images, coding features and extensions to Bard.

In case you missed the announcement, Google has removed the waitlist for Bard and is now offering the service in additional countries and languages. More are expected to be added soon.

Featured image created by the author using Midjourney.