With integration to Gmail and Maps, Google enhances Bard AI Chatbot, gaining an edge in the AI competition

Google has enhanced its Bard AI chatbot by integrating it with prominent apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube. This augmentation is expected to make Bard even more efficient, highlighting Google's strategy of leveraging its already popular products in the competition against contenders like OpenAI.

With this update, Bard can extract details from YouTube, Maps, and Google's Flights and Shopping features. It can also access and summarize user data from Gmail, Docs, and Drive if given the necessary permissions. For instance, Bard can be instructed to collate and summarize emails related to an upcoming trip.

Furthermore, Bard has expanded its integrative capacities. Users might ask Bard to locate a previously saved list of their desired dining spots and display their positions on a map. They can also combine a photo upload to Lens with a request to find related YouTube clips.

These innovations stem from Google's latest PaLM 2 language model. Sissie Hsiao, who oversees Assistant and Bard at Google, emphasizes the model's improved tuning. Crucially, Hsiao assured that data from apps like Gmail or Docs won't be utilized for advertising or refining Google's AI systems.

Google's latest enhancements to Bard emphasize the company's edge in AI, considering they have nine applications with a user base exceeding a billion, and all are gradually being incorporated with AI.

Hsiao equated the revamped Bard to a "personal assistant" and highlighted its evolution as an LLM with broader capabilities. Following ChatGPT's unexpected debut last year, Google accelerated its efforts to develop Bard, which faced initial challenges.

However, Bard, like other chatbots, remains susceptible to relaying inaccurate information. Google's solution? An improved "Google it" button now indicates validated answers with a green highlight that links to the source. Responses that can't be verified are flagged in yellow, assisting users in discerning potential inaccuracies.

Google continues its foray into AI, incorporating AI features into its Workspace apps and revealing its ambitions to embed AI into its flagship products further.

In addition, Google is developing Gemini, a newer, more advanced language model. This model, which aims to enhance Bard and other Google offerings, is currently under review by select developers, according to reports from The Information.