For more than a year, Google has raced to build technology that could match ChatGPT, the eye-opening chatbot offered by the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI.

On Wednesday, the tech giant took another step in the ongoing race, releasing a new version of its own chatbot, Google Bard. Available to English speakers in more than 170 territories and countries, including the United States, beginning immediately, the updated bot is underpinned by new A.I. technology called Gemini, which the company has been developing since the start of the year.

“This is the beginning of the Gemini era,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview. “It’s the realization of the vision we had when we set up Google DeepMind,” the company’s A.I. lab. He said that Google would roll three different versions of the technology into a wide range of products and services in the coming months.

Mr. Pichai and Demis Hassabis, who oversees Google DeepMind, said Gemini was more powerful than Google’s previous chatbot technologies, and that it could generate more-accurate responses and come closer to mimicking human reasoning in some situations.