• Google has released an updated version of its Bard chatbot, which can now connect to Google’s suite of apps like YouTube and Gmail.
• Once connected, users can prompt Bard to use information from their personal YouTube or Gmail accounts to help them.
• Bard can now summarise your emails, help you plan trips and more thanks to the update.

Today Google says that its Bard generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform can now integrate with other Google apps like Gmail and YouTube via Bard Extensions.

The tech giant gives an example of the chatbot connected to Gmail, where you can ask it to summarise recent emails from a certain sender. Bard will then produce a chatbot summary of all the correspondence right from your account.

“With Extensions, Bard can find and show you relevant information from the Google tools you use every day — like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels — even when the information you need is across multiple apps and services,” explains Google in a new blog post.

“For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that takes up many tabs), 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 there — all within one conversation,” it adds.

Users can check out the experimental Bard page here to begin trying out the new features. You will first have to download the chatbot’s extension and join Google Workspace. From this menu you can launch different Bard prompts for your different Google apps. Or you can start a new chat with the extension enabled across Google’s suite.

The company says that these new features are possible because of an update to the PaLM 2 large language model that powers Bard – one which Google calls its “most capable yet.” The technology that Bard was built on existed at Google for some time, but the chatbot was still released with many different disclaimers from the company warning of limitations in order to rapidly compete with Microsoft and Bing.

“Based on your feedback, we’ve applied state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques to train the model to be more intuitive and imaginative. So, whether you want to collaborate on something creative, start in one language and continue in one of 40+ others, or ask for in-depth coding assistance, Bard can now respond with even greater quality and accuracy,” the blog post reads.

After emerging from relative obscurity late last year, generative AI models and chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT have become household names. Recent Google Search results indicate that searches for terms like “what is AI technology” and “how to invest in AI” have skyrocketed in South Africa in the last few months.