Google’s Bard Integrates with Google Apps for Enhanced Customization and Collaboration

TL;DR: Google’s experimental AI, Bard, has received a significant upgrade – Bard Extensions – allowing for seamless integration with Google apps and services. This enhancement empowers users to receive tailored responses for tasks like trip planning, job applications, and more. Bard Extensions now facilitate easy access to information from Gmail, Docs, Drive, and other familiar tools, streamlining tasks that involve multiple applications. Additionally, Bard’s “Google it” feature has been refined, enabling users to verify information more efficiently. These improvements, along with expanded language support, demonstrate Bard’s commitment to user-centric innovation.

Google has rolled out a significant upgrade to Bard, its experimental AI, enabling users to benefit from tailored responses for various tasks. It is called Bard Extensions.

Connect to Google apps and services

With the launch of Bard Extensions in English, users can now seamlessly interact and collaborate with Bard in a whole new way. These extensions allow Bard to retrieve and display relevant information from everyday Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels. This means users can efficiently gather information across multiple apps and services within a single conversation.

For example, if you’re planning a complex trip, Bard can help by extracting suitable dates from Gmail, providing real-time flight and hotel information, offering Google Maps directions, and even suggesting YouTube videos for activities at the destination.

Similarly, if you’re using Bard to assist in a job application, you can ask it to locate your resume in Drive and summarize it into a concise personal statement, streamlining the process.

Privacy assurance

Google emphasizes its commitment to safeguarding users’ personal information. For those utilizing Workspace extensions, content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive remains confidential, not viewed by human reviewers, and not used for advertising or model training. Users maintain control over their privacy settings and can disable extensions at any time.

Easily double-check responses and build on shared conversations

Incorporating user feedback, Bard now offers an improved “Google it” feature for responses in English. By clicking on the “G” icon, users can have Bard evaluate the response for verifiability across the web. This allows for a more informed approach to information consumption.

Furthermore, users can now seamlessly build on shared Bard conversations. When someone shares a Bard chat through a public link, recipients can continue the conversation, asking additional questions or using it as a starting point for their own ideas.

Access features in more places

Google is expanding access to Bard’s existing English language features, including image uploads with Lens, Search images in responses, and modifying Bard’s responses, to over 40 languages. This broadened accessibility reflects Google’s commitment to making Bard available to a diverse global audience.

Try it!

The enhancements to Bard are made possible by updates to the PaLM 2 model, now the most capable iteration. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques have been applied based on user feedback, resulting in a more intuitive and imaginative model. Bard is now equipped to deliver even higher-quality and accurate responses, catering to a wide range of user needs. You can try it on bard.google.com.