Racing for a greater share of the generative AI market, Google has lifted the waitlist restrictions for Bard, the chatbot that it released in a limited capacity in March in response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other offerings such as Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing.

“As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories—with more coming soon,” Sissie Hsiao, vice-president and general manager for Assistant and Bard at Google, said in a blog post.

The decision was announced at the tech giant’s annual developer conference Google I/O on Wednesday, where it also rolled out PaLM 2, its newest large language model that will power the updated chatbot and function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features.

Google also made two other crucial announcements. One is that Bard will soon be upgraded to include multimodal content, meaning the chatbot will be able to deliver information in a variety of formats, expanding its capabilities beyond just text-based responses.

The second is that the company will be rolling out Japanese and Korean versions of the chatbot, and will “expand to the top 40 languages very soon after I/O,” according to John Krawczyk, senior product director at Google and one of the leads on Bard, per TechCrunch.

Krawczyk said Google is rolling out other languages separately as a safety measure. That comes as little surprise in the light of some of the criticism that Bard has faced since its release. The bot didn’t get off to a great start, making a factual error in its very first demo in February. Google employees themselves internally mocked the announcement, calling it “rushed” and “botched” in a series of memes.

But that criticism has taken on a more serious tone since, with employees calling Bard a “pathological liar” and “cringeworthy.” According to a Bloomberg report last month, which cited 18 current and former employees and internal documents, Google has been providing low-quality information in a race to keep up with the competition, giving less priority to its ethical commitments. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton also quit Google recently saying he is afraid of AI’s impact and that companies haven’t really thought deeply about it.