- Google’s AI chatbot can now answer questions based on information it finds in your Gmail inbox and Drive storage.
- With the new integration, you 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’ve stored in Drive.
There are a wide variety of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but with its new feature it aims to save the user from having to scan a pile of emails or documents to find specific information.
With this feature, you can have Bard put information into a chart or use it in other ways, such as creating a bulleted summary. For now, service is only available in English.
While allowing Bard to access your personal email and documents would raise privacy and data usage concerns, Google says it won’t use that information to train Bard’s public model and won’t be visible to actual reviewers. You also don’t need to turn on Gmail, Docs and Drive integrations. Google asks you to sign up first and allows you to opt out at any time.
Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product manager, says that to use this feature, you can have Bard search directly in your Gmail, for example, you can find the answer by typing @mail at the beginning of your question. You can simply ask, “Check my email for information about my upcoming flight.”
Bard’s extensions aren’t just limited to Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Google also said that the chatbot; Maps announced that it will also connect to YouTube and Google Flights. This means you can now ask Bard to get real-time flight information, find nearby attractions, highlight YouTube videos on a particular topic, and much more.
“The reason we started this experiment is primarily because a language model product actually integrates with your personal data,” Krawczyk said. “We want to make sure we do this right.” says. Google is also making other significant improvements to Bard. This includes a new way to double-check Bard’s answers via the chatbot’s “Google It” button.
Since Bard’s release in February, Google has been slowly adding more features to Bard, including the ability to generate and debug code, as well as build functions for Google Sheets. Google recently added support for Google Lens to Bard, allowing you to use the tool to work on caption ideas for a photo or find more information about the photo.
Compiled by: Damla Şayan
