Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from the web — it now scans your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integrationYou can ask Bard to find and summarize the contents of an email or highlight the most important points of a document you’ve saved to Drive.
There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they can save you from sifting through a mountain of emails or documents to find specific information. You Bart can use that information in other ways, such as putting it on a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is currently only available in English.
Giving Bard access to your private email and documents raises concerns about privacy and data usage, with Google saying the information won’t be used to train Bard’s public model or viewed by human reviewers. Neither should you want Enable integrations with Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Google will ask you to opt in first, and you can turn it off at any time.
To use the feature, says Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product lead on the edge You can search for Bard directly in your Gmail. Or, you can simply ask, “Check my email for information about my upcoming flight.”
“This is the first time a language model product is truly integrated with your personal data”
Bard’s extensions aren’t limited to Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Google also announced that the chatbot will be integrated with Maps, YouTube and Google Flights. This means you can ask Bard to pull up real-time flight information, find nearby destinations, surface YouTube videos on a specific topic, and more. Google will enable all three of these extensions by default.
“The reason we’re starting this experiment… is primarily because it’s the first time a language model product is truly integrated with your personal data,” says Krawczyk. “We want to make sure we get it right.” Krawczyk says Google plans to expand Google Bard’s integrations to more “products across Google and partners outside of Google.”
Google is making some other significant improvements to Bard. It also includes a new way to double-check the bard’s responses with the chatbot’s “Google It” button. While the button previously allowed you to search for topics related to the bard’s answer on Google, now a Google search will show whether the bard’s answers contain corroborating or contradicting information.
When you press the “Google It” button on supported answers, information verified by Google Search will be highlighted in green and unverified answers in orange. You can mouse over highlighted sentences for more context on what Bart may have gotten right or wrong. Google is adding a way to continue a conversation with a bard based on a shared link, allowing you to create a question that 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 Bardle Google LensLets you use the tool to brainstorm caption ideas for a photo or find more information about it.
