What happened
Shares of Alphabet (GOOG 0.88%) (GOOGL 0.73%) moved higher Thursday after the tech giant introduced new features for its Bard AI chatbot, and also launched the tool in international markets including Europe and Brazil.
The stock closed the session up 4.7% on the news.
So what
All year, Alphabet stock has moved according to investors' assessments of its AI strategy, so it wasn't a surprise to see the stock bounce on Thursday's news.
Alphabet said that Bard was being made available in the European Union after the company assuaged the concerns of privacy regulators. The latest versions of Bard include new privacy features globally.
At the same time, Alphabet also added new features to Bard, allowing users to talk to it in more than 40 languages, and gave it a voice for the first time with a text-to-speech function.
Alphabet also rose in line with gains of the broader market as the rally triggered by Wednesday's cooler-than-expected inflation report continued and investors bet that the U.S. economy will continue its recovery.
Additionally, some reports have come out showing the digital advertising market is starting to come back, and TD Cowen boosted its price target on Alphabet from $130 to $140 due to stronger growth in its search business.
Now what
OpenAI's ChatGPT and its partnership with Microsoft have posed a threat to Alphabet, and investors are keen to see signs that the Google parent is improving Bard. Traders lifted the stock in May when it unveiled a new version of the chatbot at its I/O conference.
While Bard still gets less than one-tenth of the inquiries of ChatGPT, it's important for Alphabet to show that it can compete with Microsoft and defend its Google Search market share.
So far, it seems to be successfully doing that, and the stock is up around 40% year to date.
