Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to getting answers just from the web: it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integrationYou can ask Bard to do things like search and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.
There are a wide range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use that information in other ways, such as putting it in a graph or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.
While giving Bard access to your email and personal documents will raise concerns about privacy and data use, Google says it will not use this information to train Bard’s public model, nor will it be seen by human reviewers. You do not either have to activate integrations with Gmail, Docs and Drive. Google will ask you to register first and you can deactivate it at any time.
To use the feature, says Jack Krawczyk, product leader at Bard. The edge You can have Bard search your Gmail directly, for example, by prefixing your question with @mail. Or you can simply ask, “Please check my email for information related to my upcoming flight.”
“This is the first time a language model product has truly integrated with your personal data”
Bard extensions aren’t limited to just Gmail, Docs, and Drive, either. Google also announced that the chatbot will also connect with Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights. This means you can now ask Bard to pull up real-time flight information, search for nearby attractions, display YouTube videos on a given topic, and much more. Google will enable these three extensions by default.
“The reason we started this experiment… is primarily because it’s the first time a language model product has actually been integrated with your personal data,” Krawczyk says. “We want to make sure we get it right.” Krawczyk adds that Google plans to expand Bard integrations to more “Google products, as well as partners outside of Google.”
Google is also making other notable improvements to Bard. This includes a new way to check Bard’s answers through the chatbot’s “Google It” button. While the button previously allowed you to search for topics related to Bard’s answer on Google, it will now show whether Bard’s answers contain information that Google Search corroborates or contradicts.
When you press the “Google It” button on supported answers, Google will highlight information verified by Search in green, while non-validated answers will be highlighted in orange. You can mouse over the highlighted sentences to get more context about what Bard may have done right or wrong. Google is also adding a way to continue a conversation with Bard based on a shared link, allowing you to elaborate on a question someone has already asked.
Since introducing Bard in February, Google has been gradually adding more features, including the ability to generate and debug code, as well as create functions for Google Sheets. Google recently added support for Google Lens in Bardoallowing you to use the tool to generate caption ideas for a photo or find more information about it.
