Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to just fetching answers 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 find and summarize the content of an email, or even highlight the most important points in a document you’ve saved to Drive.
There are a number of uses for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use this information in other ways, such as putting it into a chart or creating a bulleted list. 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 won’t use that information to train Bard’s public model, nor will it be seen by humans reviewers. Neither do you have to enable the integrations with Gmail, Docs and Drive. Google will ask you to sign up first, and you can disable it at any time.
To use the feature, says Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product manager The edge you can either have Bard search your Gmail directly, for example by prefacing your question with @mail. Or you can simply ask, “Check my email for information related to 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 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 retrieve real-time flight information, find nearby attractions, show YouTube videos on a specific topic and much more. Google will enable these three extensions by default.
“The reason we’re starting this experiment… is primarily because it’s the first time a language model product is really integrated with your personal data,” Krawczyk says. “We want to make sure we get it right.” Krawczyk adds that Google plans to expand Bard’s integrations to more “products across Google as well as partners outside of Google.”
Google is also making some other notable improvements to Bard. It includes a new way to double-check Bard’s responses via the chatbot’s “Google It” button. Whereas the button previously let you search for topics related to Bard’s answers on Google, it will now show 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 the information verified by Search in green, while any unvalidated answers will be highlighted in orange. You can hover over the highlighted sentences to get more context on what Bard might have gotten 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 the introduction of Bard in February, Google has gradually added 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 Bardso you can use the tool to brainstorm caption ideas for an image or find more information about it.
