Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it will update Bard, its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, to help people write code to develop software, as the tech giant plays catch-up in a fast-moving race on AI technology.

The release of ChatGPT, a chatbot from the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, last year caused a sprint in the technology sector to put AI into more users' hands.

Google describes Bard as an experiment allowing collaboration with generative AI, technology that relies on past data to create rather than identify content.

Bard will be able to code in 20 programming languages including Java, C++ and Python, and can also help debug and explain code to users, Google said on Friday.

The company said Bard can also optimize code to make it faster or more efficient with simple prompts such as "Could you make that code faster?".

Currently, Bard can be accessed by a small set of users who can chat with the bot and ask questions instead of running Google's traditional search tool.