The Google Bard chatbot is getting better at math and also can import tables to Sheets

Google has announced it is rolling out a couple of new features for users of its Bard AI chatbot. One is a small but quite useful addition, and the other is a far deeper improvement that has some backend changes for Bard.

The small but useful new feature will now allow people who use Bard to make tables to quickly export them to Google's Sheets spreadsheets. Google stated:

So when Bard generates a table in its response — like if you ask it to “create a table for volunteer sign-ups for my animal shelter” — you can now export it right to Sheets.

The other new feature will enable Bard to present more accurate results with requests about math and word problems, along with better coding answers. Google says that it is using what is called "implicit code execution” that will detect when a question is related to math. Bard will then figure out the answer in the background.

Google stated that this new method goes beyond the typical large language models (LLMs) that are used in other chatbot AI programs like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Google says Bard now calculates math and similar questions in both LLMs and with traditional code. It added:

Through implicit code execution, 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. 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%.

Google does give the obvious statement that even with this new method, mistakes in math answers and coding might still happen with Bard, but it does say that it hopes using implicit code execution will make improvements in a lot of these areas.

The Google Bard chatbot is getting better at math and also can import tables to Sheets