Buckle up, ChatGPT. Bard Extensions is here!
Bard, the AI-powered chatbot tool designed by Google, can now connect to your Google apps and services, transforming into a powerful AI assistant.
Thatβs right! Not only will you be able to ask questions and get answers from a global source of information, but you will also be able to bring in your own information. All of this in one place and combined in the same context.
With Extensions, Bard can find and show you relevant information from the Google tools you use every day β like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels β even when the information you need is across multiple apps and services. (Pinsky, 2023)
Okay, but what does this mean? And what is Bard?
Bard is a large language model (LLM) chatbot developed by Google AI. It was launched on March 21, 2023, in a limited capacity, specifically for U.S. and UK users who joined a waitlist. On May 10, 2023, Google removed the waitlist and made Bard available in over 180 countries and territories.
The initial perception of Bard was that it was an inefficient clone of ChatGPT, considering that at that time, ChatGPT was already multilingual while Bard was not yet. Essentially, they both did the same thing, which was answering questions in a conversational manner. If that wasnβt enough, Google declared and still maintains that Bard is an experiment, something that did not make everyone take it seriously.
Many of us who have used Bard have done so with trust in Google as a company, giving us the opportunity to train a model committed to scientific excellence rather than popularity. However, Bard Extensions breaks the common scheme of the chatbot and positions itself as a collaborative tool. Merging into a single tool what others have had to do separately.
Does Bard Extensions propose something new?
As for functionality, the truth is that it does not. Still, there are advantages in the way Bard is doing it.
Letβs see:
- The collaboration model proposed by Bard is very similar to the one proposed by Microsoft Copilot. Basically, it aims to facilitate actions on a group of applications, using natural language guidance and leveraging user information as part of the context.
- Nevertheless, while Microsoft ties you to an operating system and payments for the use of Copilot (associated with the corresponding licenses), Google offers Bard in an open, free, and web-based manner, achieving an OS-agnostic solution.
About Extensions
At the time of writing this article, it is only 18 hours after the release of Extensions. Therefore, any conclusion or opinion would be premature.
Google introduces it with the next video:
With several tests and a lot of amazement, I have been able to verify that the integration with Google Workspace, YouTube, and Google Maps works wonderfully.
Currently, it supports:
If you want to try it, you just have to keep in mind that the extensions are only enabled for Bard in English:
Is everything rosy?
The short answer is no.
While there is no doubt that this is a boost for Bard, the involvement of personal information implies privacy issues. The fact that Bard can access our messaging and reveal details during the interaction with the chatbot allows any reviewer to potentially access sensitive information.
Google uses conversations (as well as feedback and related data) from Bard users to improve Google products (such as the generative machine-learning models that power Bard), so we can make them safer, more helpful, and work better for all users. Human review is a necessary step of the model improvement process. Through their review, rating, and rewrites, humans help enable quality improvements of generative machine-learning models like the ones that power Bard.
We take a number of precautions to protect your privacy during this human review process: conversations (as well as feedback and related data like your language, device type, or location info) that reviewers see and annotate are not associated with any user accounts. We pick a random sample for such human review, and only a portion of all Bard conversations are reviewed.
Bard conversations that have been reviewed by human reviewers (as well as feedback and related data like your language, device type, or location info) are not deleted when you delete your Bard activity because they are kept separately and are not connected to your Google Account. Instead, they are retained for up to 3 years. (Bard Privacy Help Hub β Bard Help, n.d.)
Therefore, we should be very careful with the information we share with Bard.
As we can see, other tools are gaining ground compared to what initially dominated ChatGPT. For us, the users, this is excellent news, as it indicates that we will have many options and wonβt be tied to the constraints of just one technology.
It is worth remembering that AI is a supportive technology, not a substitute for humans. Do not rely on any judgment that does not align with your own thinking, and do not share any information that you would not want to share publicly. Having that in mind, any artificial intelligence tool will be your best ally for your day-to-day life.
Thanks for the reading!
References
Pinsky, Y. (2023, September 19). Bard can now connect to your Google apps and services. Google. https://blog.google/products/bard/google-bard-new-features-update-sept-2023/
Bard Privacy Help Hub β Bard Help. (n.d.). https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13594961?hl=en
