Google helps Bard sing sweetly with other Google apps and services

Google helps Bard sing sweetly with other Google apps and services

In a move to expand the capabilities of Bard, Google is opening up Bard access to more people, and launching new features to help them boost productivity by connecting Bard with Google apps and services.  Along with the move, Bard is increasing collaboration, by letting users start work in one language and continuing on in more than forty other languages. 

The company has also been listening to the feedback from users coupled with the updates Google has made to its PaLM2 model, it has been able to accelerate Bard’s ability to be more intuitive, imaginative, and responsive than ever before.

Bard has been learning from user feedback (thumbs up and down) on its responses with the company applying reinforcement learning techniques to train the model to be more intuitive and imaginative.

Greater app integration

Users can ask for in-depth coding assistance or learn about new topics from different points of view with greater quality and accuracy. 

With Extensions, Bard can find and show you relevant information from the Google tools you use every day even when the information you need is across multiple apps and services. This could be across apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and even Google Flights and hotels. You can pull together what you need across information sources and bring ideas to life easier and faster.

This could make planning a holiday a painless affair as you can now ask Bard to grab the dates that work for everyone from Gmail, look up real-time flight and hotel information, see Google Maps directions to the airport, and even watch YouTube videos of things to do when you’re there.

But Bard’s integration goes even deeper into Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Docs, and Drive. By granting Bard permission, you can enable Bard to interact with your personal data and information so you can find, summarise and answer questions across your personal content.

For example, if you’re applying for a new job and using Bard to help with the process. You could ask Bard to “find my resume titled June 2023 from my Drive and summarise it to a short paragraph personal statement,” and continue collaborating on your new cover letter.

This feature is available in English to start with and rolled out to other Bard-supported languages soon.

Users can also build on others’ conversations with Bard. For example, when someone shares a Bard chat with you through a public link, you can continue the conversation and ask Bard additional questions about that topic or use it as a starting point for your own ideas.

Double checking responses

Users can now double-check Bard’s AI-generated responses by finding content that's likely similar to or different from its statements using Google Search. Starting in English, when a statement can be evaluated, you'll see it highlighted in Bard’s response and can click the “G” icon so Bard will read the response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it.

Privacy protected

Google says that it is committed to protecting a user’s personal information. It says that 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. The user can adjust their privacy settings in deciding how to use these extensions with the ability to turn them off at any time.