Google Bard Extensions

Since September 19, a new feature is now available on Google Bard: extensions. It's an interconnection between Google's chatbot and several services you might use daily. Here's an overview:

You'll now be able to, using natural language:

• plan travel itineraries with Google Flights, Hotels, and Maps

• browse YouTube metadata to find the right video without having to search through a wall of thumbnails on the platform

• and, in my opinion the most impressive feature, you'll be able to query all your emails, documents, and content stored on Google Drive!

Prerequisites

• a Google account

• use Google Chrome

• use Bard for a certain period (yes! the feature is being rolled out progressively to all users)

To use an extension, simply prefix your prompt with @gmail my prompt, if you want, for example, to access your email content, as shown in the demo below.

Use case: summarizing information from emails

I'll take a personal use case as an example: from Friday to Saturday night, I went out with friends in Strasbourg and took several Ubers. Let's say I want to know, while doing my accounting, how much money I spent. All I have to do is ask Bard:

I find this feature absolutely brilliant because it's going to save me a lot of time on various tedious searches when I'm looking for simple information in my personal or work data.

This is just a tiny glimpse of what you can get from the Google Workspace connection: imagine what you could get by querying Google Sheets files or invoices stored in Google Docs this way!

A quick word on your data privacy

I naturally wondered what would happen to my data crawled by Bard from my Gmail. In practice, Google stores by default, for a configurable period of 3 to 36 months:

• your geolocation when you use Bard

• the Google email address you use during your interactions with the service

• your IP address

It's important to note that you can choose to delete this information at any time.

Regarding the connection between Bard and your Google Workspace:

• Your data cannot be viewed or reviewed by human reviewers

• It is not used to train Bard

• It is not used for advertising purposes

I've seen several LinkedIn posts claiming the opposite, but the service's privacy statement is clear on these points.

Final thoughts

Let's not kid ourselves: Google Bard has been somewhat overshadowed in the public eye by ChatGPT for various reasons (notably commercial ones), but it remains a high-tech tool that has nothing to be ashamed of in terms of performance and features compared to its main competitor. In fact:

• it is updated much more regularly than ChatGPT

• it is trained daily on data continuously crawled by Google, giving it access to the most recent information

• it is multimodal: you can upload an image and ask it to analyze it (just like with Bing AI)

• and now, it offers extensions that let you query your Google Workspace data, YouTube's entire video library, as well as all of Google's travel and transportation services (Maps, Flights, etc.)!

Give it a try and let us know what you think!