The artificial intelligence chatbot Google’s Bard is evolving.
The company announced on Tuesday (19) a series of updates to Bard that will give the artificial intelligence tool access to Google’s full suite of tools — including YouTube, Google Drive, Google Flights and others — to help users in a wide range of ways. variety of tasks.
Users will be able, for example, to ask Bard to plan an upcoming trip, complete with real flight options. Or a user can ask the tool to summarize meeting notes taken in a recent Google Drive document.
Connections to other Google services are just some of the Bard improvements rolled out on Tuesday. Other updates include the ability to communicate with the chatbot in multiple languages, new fact-checking capabilities, and a broad update to the large language model on which the tool was built.
The new features mark the biggest update to Google’s Bard in the six months since it was widely released to the public.
The update comes as Google and other tech giants, including Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, race to roll out increasingly sophisticated consumer-facing AI technologies and to convince users that such tools are more than just a gimmick.
Google — which at the beginning of this year supposedly issued an internal “code red” after OpenAI beat it to the launch of its AI chatbot — now it’s flexing the power of its other widely used software programs that could make Bard more useful.
“These services together are very, very powerful,” Sissie Hsiao, general manager of Google Assistant and Bard, told CNN before launch. “Bringing together all the power of these tools will save people time — in 20 seconds, in minutes, you can do something that would take maybe an hour or more.”
Previously, Bard was able to help with tasks like writing essay drafts or planning a friend’s baby shower based on Google’s Big Language Model, an AI algorithm trained on vast amounts of data. But now, Bard will also draw on information from several other Google services.
With the new extensions, Bard will now pull information from YouTube, Google Maps, Flights, and Hotels by default.
This will allow users to ask Bard things like “Give me a model for how to write a best man speech and show me YouTube videos about them for inspiration” or travel suggestions, complete with driving directions, according to Google. Bard users can choose to disable these extensions at any time.
Users can also choose to link their Gmail, Docs, and Google Drive with Bard so the tool can help them analyze and manage their personal information. The tool could, for example, help with a query like: “Find my Drive’s most recent lease and check how much the security deposit was,” Google said.
The company said that Google Workspace users’ personal information will not be used to train Bard or for targeted advertising purposes, and that users can withdraw their permission for the tool to access their information at any time.
“This is the first step in a fundamentally new feature for Bard – the ability to talk to other apps and services to provide more useful answers,” Google said of the extensions tool. He added that “this is a very young area of AI” and that it will continue to improve based on user feedback.
Bard is also launching a “double check” button that will allow users to evaluate the accuracy of their answers. When a user clicks the button, certain segments of Bard’s response will be highlighted to show where the Google Search results confirm or differ from what the chatbot said.
The double check feature is designed to combat a common AI issue called “hallucinations”, where an AI tool confidently makes a statement that appears real but is not actually based on facts.
“We are constantly working to reduce these hallucinations in Bard,” Hsiao said. But in the meantime, the company wanted to come up with a way to tackle them. “You can think of it as spell checking, but double-checking the facts.”
Bard will now also allow a user to share a chatbot conversation with another person, who can then expand the chat on their own.
It’s still early days for Bard, which launched in March as an “experiment,” and still notes on your website that the tool “may display inaccurate or offensive information that does not represent Google’s views.” But this latest update offers a glimpse into how Google might ultimately try to incorporate generative AI into its various services.
