Google Supercharges Bard Chatbot With Gmail, Maps, YouTube Integration

Instead of being incorporated directly into Google’s search engine, Bard can be found on its own website. Google’s chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Other than the Apprentice Bard, Google is also testing other AI-powered products, including a search page. Google employees are testing potential challengers to viral AI chatbot ChatGPT — including its homegrown chatbot “Apprentice Bard” — CNBC reported on Tuesday, citing sources and internal communication seen by the publication. Google has been working fast to iterate Bard after the company was surprised by the arrival of ChatGPT last year.

Since unveiling its Bard conversational AI in February, Google has been working to improve the chatbot’s responses, after it spouted misinformation in its Twitter debut. More recently, we’ve seen the company add generative AI features to practically its entire suite of services, while access to the Bard chatbot remained exclusive to a few. We saw some Pixel users receive invites to test out Google’s bot yesterday, and today, the company said it’s “starting to open access to Bard.”

Google is opening up access to its Bard AI chatbot today

Google announced Tuesday that Bard can now retrieve information from YouTube, Maps, and Google’s Flights and Shopping search features. Also, if granted permission, it can access information from users’ personal content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive to summarize documents. It isn’t the first time that Bard has taken the opposing side in a Google antitrust battle. In March, tech blogger Jane Manchun Wong posted an exchange in which the chatbot declared Google had a “monopoly on the digital advertising market” – after it was asked to weigh in on a separate federal lawsuit filed by the DOJ and eight US states. In case you don’t like the response that’s getting generated, Google now lets you cut off the bot mid-sentence.

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This is just weeks after the tech giant’s management reportedly issued a “code red” over the rise of ChatGPT, which has been making waves recently as it’s able to generate written human-like text. The bot reportedly uses Google’s own language technology, called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google has already rolled out AI-assistant features to its Workspace apps and has clarified how it plans to keep weaving AI into its most popular products. If Google is found to have broken the law, the second trial will be held to determine a proper remedy. Potential outcomes, according to experts, include the implementation of so-called a “choice screen” for users, a forced discontinuation of business practices or even a breakup of the company. Google’s own “Bard” AI chatbot says the US Justice Department has a winning case in the landmark antitrust trial against the search giant – and blasted the company for wielding illegal “monopoly power” that has “harmed consumers,” according to a Post analysis.

A more interesting function is the ability to prompt the system with an image. This is powered by Google Lens, which is able to identify objects within pictures. Google gives the example of submitting a photo of your dogs alongside the prompt “write a funny caption about these two.” Google Lens identifies the breeds of the dogs, and Bard then writes something relevant to their characteristics.

“This is really the first step in taking an LLM and not just as a text model, but actually bringing it into what we call agentive capabilities,” Hsiao said, likening the updated Bard to a “personal assistant.” The new abilities are a big step forward for Google’s chatbot and serve as a reminder of the advantage companies such as Google have in the AI race. Google has nine products with over 1 billion users that it’s eagerly weaving AI into.

Publicly available information show revenues at Alphabet — Google’s parent company — rose 41% in 2021, while Alphabet Class A shares have fallen 32% since January 2022. Hsiao told Insider the information taken from apps such as Gmail or Docs would not be used for advertising or for training Google’s AI models. The visual results will appear in Bard the same way they might in some Google queries.

It’s also gained extensions, including from Google’s own apps and services as well as third-party partners like Adobe, and the ability to explain code, structure data in a table, and surface images in its responses. “We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people,” the Google blog post reads. The company said it will continue to improve the chatbot and add capabilities, such as going beyond text responses to other mediums like images, audio or video.

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• Google said that it’s important to know such challenges exist, and noted that quality and safety are significant issues to consider.
• ChatGPT is the handiwork of OpenAI, an AI company with heavy backing from Google rival Microsoft.
• Pichai has been emphasizing the importance of artificial intelligence for the past six years.
• Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now reply to your questions in real time, as spotted earlier by 9to5Google.
• Google has been working fast to iterate Bard after the company was surprised by the arrival of ChatGPT last year.

When Bard starts generating a reply, you’ll see a “Skip response” button that appears above the prompt box. Press it, and Bard will stop generating its reply, allowing you to type in another question or regenerate its response without having to wait for the whole answer. Assistant users can expect to get (or at least eventually get) the same Bard experience as they do on desktop, along with its integration of apps such as Gmail and Maps, but with the addition of voice input and output — and, importantly, on mobile. It’s a way of rebooting Assistant with a new large language model that Google already uses to power Bard. “We are pretty excited about taking this step toward building trust with language models,” notes Krawczyk. “Of course, we certainly want to be transparent when we’re not confident or even when we make a mistake,” he says.

If users opt in, Assistant with Bard is expected to become the new experience when interacting with Assistant on Android or when using the Google app on iPhone. What’s most interesting about Assistant with Bard is it no longer sets voice as the primary mode of interaction. Instead, users are expected to see three icons on the screen — a microphone, a keyboard, and a camera — denoting three ways to interact. In addition, the company wants to ensure users understand how that data is and is not used. If you’re using personal data that’s been brought in from Gmail, Google Drive or Docs, that information is not used for reinforcement learning.

• Publicly available information show revenues at Alphabet — Google’s parent company — rose 41% in 2021, while Alphabet Class A shares have fallen 32% since January 2022.
• The bot reportedly uses Google’s own language technology, called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
• “Of course, we certainly want to be transparent when we’re not confident or even when we make a mistake,” he says.
• The chatbot cited several specific examples of what it described as “Google’s anti-competitive behavior” referenced in the case, including its default search deals with Apple and Mozilla.

Earlier this year, Microsoft added a similar chatbot to its search engine Bing. Google says Bard will often answer a prompt with a number of drafts, allowing users to pick the best starting point for their conversation with the chatbot. The long-term vision for all these products, once we all finish trying to make them say racist things and tell fart jokes, is to build a general AI that can help us manage all phases of our life. Right now, the best we can hope for is half-decent information retrieval and quasi-well-written blog posts, and Bing seems to do both better. Apprentice Bard appears to work in a way that’s similar to ChatGPT, as users can ask a question in a dialog box and get an answer in response, per CNBC.