Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling 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 integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email, or even highlight the key points of a document you’ve saved in Drive.
There are a whole host 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 placing it in a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.
While giving Bard access to your personal email and documents will raise privacy and data usage concerns, Google says it will not use this information to train Bard’s public model, nor will it be reviewed by human reviewers. being seen. Not you either to have to enable the Gmail, Docs, and Drive integrations. Google will first ask you to sign in. You can disable this at any time.
To use the feature, says Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product leader The edge You can also have Bard search directly in your Gmail, for example by prefixing your question with @mail. Or you can simply ask, “Check my email for information about my upcoming flight.”
“It’s the first time that a language model product truly integrates with your personal data”
Bard’s extensions aren’t limited to just Gmail, Docs, and Drive, either. Google also announced that the chatbot will also connect to Maps, YouTube and Google Flights. This means you can now ask Bard to get real-time flight information, find nearby attractions, watch YouTube videos on a particular topic, and much more. Google will enable these three extensions by default.
“The reason we’re starting this experiment… is mainly because it’s the first time a language model product really integrates with your personal data,” says Krawczyk. “We want to make sure we get that right.” Krawczyk adds that Google plans to expand Bard’s integrations to more “products from Google and partners outside of Google.”
Google is also making some other notable improvements to Bard. That includes a new way to double-check Bard’s answers via the chatbot’s “Google It” button. While the button previously allowed you to search Google for topics related to Bard’s answer, it now shows whether Bard’s answers contain information that Google Search confirms or contradicts.
When you press the “Google It” button on supported answers, Google will highlight Search-verified information in green, while non-validated answers will be highlighted in orange. You can mouse over the highlighted sentences for more context on 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, so you can build on a question someone has already asked.
Since launching 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 Bard, so you can use the tool to brainstorm caption ideas for a photo or find more information about it.