(San Francisco) Google announced Tuesday that Bard, its generative AI dialogue software, can now connect to the company’s other services — email, YouTube, Maps (mapping), etc. – Another step in the race to spread this technology.
“For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that requires multiple tabs), you can ask Bard to retrieve dates that work for everyone in Gmail, look up flights and hotels, check the flight to the airport” in Google Maps and even see YouTube videos about activities to do there – all in the same conversation,” explains a press release from the American group.
The internet giant has been developing sophisticated AI systems for years, but was surprised by the success of ChatGPT (OpenAI) at the end of 2022 and by the launch in February of Microsoft’s new Bing, its search engine using generative AI. Capabilities.
Google launched Bard at the same time, a dialog capable of producing all kinds of texts (editorials, articles, instructions, dialogues, etc.) based on a simple query in everyday language, like ChatGPT.
The new tool introduced on Tuesday, called Bard Extensions, can also extract data from Google Docs and Google Drive (storage), including documents in PDF format, the company said.
It must also help users get rid of “hallucinations”, when the program does not have an answer to the question asked and invents one – because it works thanks to a linguistic model: it does not “understand” what the words mean.
A new button, Google It, lets you compare Bard results to Google search results on the same topic, and report any discrepancies.
Big tech companies, led by Microsoft and Google, are rapidly deploying generative AI functionality in their online software (office, codes, search, email, etc.) to turn them into a kind of personal assistant.
At the same time, they have to overcome the objections of regulatory bodies, especially European ones, because this latest generation of AI is more worrying than the previous generation in terms of data confidentiality, risks of use for malicious purposes (fraud, disinformation) or deletion. Of jobs.
On Bard’s web page, a window appears stating that new “extensions” will only be able to access personal data “with your permission.”
Any extraction of personal content from Docs, Drive, or Gmail will not be used to target advertising, Bard training, or visibility by company employees.
