WATCH: Google’s Bard integrates new features in Gmail, Maps and YouTube

Tech giant Google has announced a major update to Google Bard that can now link with other services such as Gmail, Maps and YouTube in order to provide more in-depth responses to prompts from users.

Google launched the generative AI platform in February to rival OpenAI’s artificial language (AI) language model ChatGPT.

At the time, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, said Bard “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models”.

Watch: Google introduces new Bard extensions

Bard extensions

Now Google has taken the AI platform to the next level with what it called “Bard Extensions in English”.

“With Extensions, Bard can find and show you relevant information from the Google tools you use every day — like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels — even when the information you need is across multiple apps and services,” said Google.

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Yury Pinsky, Bard’s director of product development, said starting on Tuesday with responses in English, users can use Bard’s “Google it” button to more easily double-check its answers.

“When you click on the ‘G’ icon, Bard will read the response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it. When a statement can be evaluated, you can click the highlighted phrases and learn more about supporting or contradicting information found by search.”

“As we continue to build Bard responsibly, we’re now expanding access to existing English language features — you can upload images with Google Lens, get Google Search images in responses, and modify Bard’s responses to be simpler, longer, shorter, more professional or more casual in all 40+ supported languages and countries,” it said.

Google added that since Bard’s initial release in February, the company has made improvements.

“The feedback from our users coupled with the updates we’ve made to our PaLM2 model have accelerated Bard’s ability to be more intuitive, imaginative, and responsive than ever before in languages and countries all over the world.”

Privacy

Google said it is committed to protecting personal information.

“If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads or used to train the Bard model. And of course, you’re always in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these extensions, and you can turn them off at any time,” the company said.  

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