Teens around the world can now access Google's AI chatbot Bard

Starting today, teens in most countries around the world will be able to use Google's AI chatbot, Bard, in English, with support for more languages to come over time, the tech giant said on Wednesday.

"We're continuing to be responsible as we open up Bard to more people. Before launching to teens, we consulted with child safety and development experts to help shape our content policies and an experience that prioritizes safety. And organizations like the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) advised us on how to keep the needs of teens and families in mind," Google said.

To access Google Bard, teens in these countries should meet the minimum age requirement to manage their own Google Account.

Bard will allow teens to dig deeper into topics, better understand complex concepts and practice new skills.

Additionally, Google is bringing a math learning experience into Bard, which will allow users to simply type or upload a picture of a math equation, and the AI chatbot will give the answer whilst sharing step-by-step explanations of how to solve it.

Further, with the new data visualization capability, Bard will be able to generate charts from tables or data included in a prompt. For instance, teens can ask the chatbot to show in a bar chart how many hours they volunteered across a few months.

The math learning experience and the data visualization capability will be available in English starting today.

In terms of safety, Google Bard has been trained to recognize areas that are inappropriate for youngsters. Google said it has put in place safety features and guardrails to help prevent unsafe content, such as illegal or age-gated substances, from appearing in its responses to teens.

Additionally, when a teen asks a fact-based question for the first time, Google will automatically run its double-check response feature to evaluate whether there's content across the web to substantiate Bard's response. For teens, it will actively recommend using double-check to help them develop information literacy and critical thinking skills.