Back in March 2023, Google opened up its first conversational AI chatbot, Google Bard, to a wider set of users. In its initial iteration, Bard was extremely limited in capability — especially compared to its chief rival ChatGPT. However, Google has promised that Bard will gradually see a series of updates that will eventually make it as capable as ChatGPT (or even better) in the days to come.
Just as Google promised, the company has constantly been updating Bard with new capabilities. Late last month, Bard incorporated something known as PaLM (Pathways Language Model), which improved the chatbot’s response to math and logic-related questions. When this happened, Google also announced that its next major goal would be to equip the chatbot with the capability to write and debug code.
Google confirmed on April 21, 2023 that it had fulfilled its promise to update Bard. The update added the ability to generate new code, debug code, and provide explanations to users. In the blog post announcing the update, Google confirmed that the ability to help with programming and developmental tasks was one of the top-requested features among Bard users.
Google also confirmed that Bard is getting the capability to natively export Python code to Google Colab without having to copy-paste anything. As of now, Bard supports coding in more than 20 programming languages — with the notable ones being C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and Typescript.
Coding using Google Bard: Everything you need to know
In the blog post announcing the changes, Google’s Group Project Manager Paige Bailey confirmed that the new changes to Bard also endow it with the capability to explain code snippets — making it easier for learners and novice users to understand coding. Experienced coders can also utilize this feature to understand the expected output from a chosen block of code.
Paige further explains that Bard can assist in debugging a code that is not functioning as intended. The process itself is as simple as typing, “this code didn’t work, please fix it.” Bard will then try to debug the code, and provide an explanation as to what really went wrong.
In addition to these features, Bard can now attribute the source of a code, particularly if it is sourced from an existing open-source project. Another key area where Bard can be helpful to coders is its ability to optimize an existing piece of code. Again, all the user needs to do from their end is to ask Bard to make the code faster.
Even with these newfound capabilities, Google still insists that Bard is in an experimental stage, and that it could occasionally come up with unexpected outputs and sub-optimal code. The company insists that developers shouldn’t wholly rely on code generated by Bard alone without actually verifying it themselves.
