Bard update improves reasoning skills, enables Google Sheets export function

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What you need to know

• Google Bard update makes the chatbot better at answering prompts.
• This includes answers to questions like “Calculate the growth rate of my savings.”
• Bard will use a new implicit code execution technique for string manipulation.
• Users can now export tables into Google Sheets.

Google Bard is getting a significant update that involves improvements in mathematical tasks, coding questions, string manipulation, and more.

The primary functionality of the new update involves responses for advanced reasoning and math prompts. In a blog post, Bard product lead Jack Krawczyk says that it is introducing a new technique called “implicit code execution” that will help Bard “detect computational prompts and run code in the background.”

For instance, I have asked Bard to “reverse the word ‘universe’ for me,” to which the AI-based assistant has reciprocated by saying, “esrevinu.” In addition, it gave me Python code that is helpful to reverse any word in code format, which is a convenient feature.

This is one of many examples Google has provided, which you can see below:

• What are the prime factors of 15683615?
• Calculate the growth rate of my savings
• Reverse the word “Lollipop” for me

The search giant says to execute such tasks relying solely on LLM (Large language models) apparently isn’t enough, which is where “implicit code execution” comes into play. You can check out the post to read about how this method was inspired by the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

“Bard identifies prompts that might benefit from logical code, writes it ‘under the hood,’ executes it and uses the result to generate a more accurate response,” Krawczyk adds. “So far, we’ve seen this method improve the accuracy of Bard’s responses to computation-based word and math problems in our internal challenge datasets by approximately 30%.”

Despite such advanced improvements coming to Bard, Google hints that it is sometimes wrong, and sometimes the AI assistant might refuse to respond promptly, or the code generated by Bard might not be entirely correct.

While these improvements come as new today, Google Bard has been constantly getting advancements lately, especially after the I/O event. It recently received precise location support and the ability to showcase images in responses.

Additional improvements to Bard in the latest update include the ability to export tables generated by the chatbot into Google Sheets.