Google is making Bard, its conversational AI tool, available to teens in a majority of nations across the globe. Teens who are of legal age to manage their own Google Account will be able to use the chatbot in English, with support for additional languages coming in the future. According to Google, the expanded launch includes "safety features and guardrails" to safeguard teens.
In a blog post, Google stated that teens can employ the tool to "find inspiration, find new hobbies, and solve everyday problems." Teens can ask Bard important questions, such as which universities to apply to, or more fun queries, such as how to learn a new sport.
Google notes that Bard is a helpful learning tool that enables teenagers to delve deeper into subjects and improve their understanding regarding complex concepts. For example, teenagers can ask Bard to help brainstorm ideas for a science fair, or use it to learn about a particular historical period to brush up their knowledge of history. Furthermore, Google is integrating a math learning tool into Bard that will let users—including teenagers—type or upload an image of a math equation. Bard will give a step-by-step explanation of how to solve the maths equation rather than just giving the answer.
Additionally, Bard can assist with data visualisation; that is, it can create charts from data included in a prompt or tables. To gain a visual understanding, a teenager could ask Bard to make a bar chat that shows the number of hours they have volunteered over the last few months.
Google is making the chatbot available to the public, but there are some safeguards in place to keep users safe. Bard has guardrails in place to help prevent dangerous content, like illegal or age-restricted substances, from appearing in its responses to teens. It has also been trained to identify topics that are inappropriate for teens.
"We also recognize that many people, including teens, are not always aware of hallucinations in LLMs. So the first time a teen asks a fact-based question, we’ll automatically run our double-check response feature, which helps evaluate whether there’s content across the web to substantiate Bard’s response," explained Tulsee Doshi, Google's product lead for Responsible AI, in the blog post. "Soon, this feature will automatically run when any new Bard user asks their first factual question. And for teens, we'll actively recommend using double-check to help them develop information literacy and critical thinking skills."
The news comes just a few weeks after Google made its generative AI search experience available to teenagers. The AI-powered search experience, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), adds a conversational mode to Google Search, allowing you to ask Google questions about a topic in a conversational language.