Google Bard now requests your actual location for better answers.

Google has pushed out another update for its generative AI chatbot, Bard. This time, it has added the ability for users to allow access to their location so Bard can use it and provide more relevant results.

A popular Google search query is “What time does X close?”, you’ll usually see businesses listed in your search results with closing times. Now you can do this with location updates in Bard and it will tell you the closing hours of the local stores you asked about.

Google hasn’t really expanded much on what exact location will enable you to do, but Bard himself says that you can get specific information about places like coffee shops and restaurants, with directions from your current location. Can get, find such events. happening near you, and get local weather information.

After testing the weather forecast, Nuven can report that it works well but has one small complaint. In the UK, where a hodgepodge of imperial and metric measurements is used, the main unit for measuring temperature is in Celsius. Despite knowing that the query was coming from Britain, Bard still decided to present his answer in Fahrenheit, even though a quick explanation would have solved it immediately.

To see what location Google Bard has for you, just look in the bottom left corner and you should see a blue dot if you’ve allowed it to use your location. Then your town or city. You can also press Update Location if it is now out of date due to travel.

OpenAI took an early lead in the generative AI race, but while it still gets updates, its knowledge is still stuck in 2021 and can no longer do as much as Bard, such as your location. Accessing or capturing and inserting images from the web. Your query results (at least on the free tier).

We are still early in the maturity of these generative AI projects so we should see many new features arrive over time. It’s so early that Google still uses Bard as an experiment.