Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to getting answers from just the web — it can now search your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With new integrationyou can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the content of an email, or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored on Drive.
There are a number of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to wade through a mountain of emails or documents to find a specific piece of information. You can then have Bard use this information in other ways, such as putting it on a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is currently only available in English.
While giving Bard access to your personal email and documents raises privacy and data usage concerns, Google says that information won’t be used to train Bard’s public model, nor will it be seen by human reviewers. Neither do you have turn on integration with Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Google will ask you to sign in first, and you can deactivate it at any time.
To use this feature, says Jack Krawczyk, product manager at Bard The Verge You can either search for Bard directly in your Gmail, for example by putting @mail in front of your question. Or you can simply ask, “Check my email for information regarding my upcoming flight.”
“This is the first time a language model product actually integrates with your personal data”
Bard’s extensions aren’t limited to Gmail, Docs, and Drive. 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, find nearby attractions, display YouTube videos on a certain topic, and much more. Google enables these three extensions by default.
“The reason we’re starting this experiment … is primarily because it’s the first time a language model product actually integrates with your personal data,” says Krawczyk. “We want to make sure we get it right. Krawczyk adds that Google plans to expand Bard’s integration to more “products across Google as well as non-Google partners.”
Google is also making some other notable improvements to Bard. This includes a new way to double-check Bard’s responses via the chatbot’s “Google It” button. While the button previously allowed you to search for topics related to Bard’s answer on Google, it now shows whether Bard’s answers contain information that Google Search confirms or contradicts.
When you press the “Google It” button for supported answers, Google will highlight information verified by Search in green, while any unverified answers will be highlighted in orange. You can mouse over the highlighted sentences to get more context about what the Bard might 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 build on a question someone has already asked.
Since the introduction of 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 Bardallowing you to use this tool to brainstorm caption ideas for a photo or find more information about it.
