Google Assistant Gets a Generative AI Upgrade, Integrates Bard

After 7 years of launching Google Assistant, the company is giving the tool AI superpowers. Assistant for Bard debuted last evening during the Made for Google event to provide personalised assistance for users. Similar to its web counterpart, the chatbot will integrate the company's existing apps like Docs and Gmail via the recently introduced extensions for Bard. 

The Mountain-view based company states the latest Bard-powered tool is capable of helping users from planning a trip to picking out details from their inbox. For the content creators, the assistant can perform several tasks like generating relevant captions and trending hashtags to match the image. 

Amid the ongoing dialogues about the company’s chameleon-like privacy policies, Google noted that the latest tool will let the users choose their individual privacy settings. Much like the rest of its AI-powered tools, Google has only let out a glimpse of Assistant for Bard without making it public. Google will make the tool available for early testers “soon” before it arrives on Android and iOS. 

LLM integration is the magic ingredient missing in voice assistants that will take it from a somewhat helpful assistant to something that will more resemble the sci-fi concept familiar with. 

By adding natural language understanding in these models asking complex, multi step queries, contextual conversations from previous discussions, even novel instructions it may not understand at first but can be explained and then remembered later can be done.

As per default the chatbot stores every interaction you have for 18 months. Apart from the prompts, Bard stores the users approximate location, IP address, and any physical addresses connected to the Google account for work or home. While these settings are activated, any conversation with Bard could be selected for human review.

While some Google fans are excited about the early "Jarvis"-style experiment, concerns have been raised as every conversation with Bard is tracked, logged and used to train the AI. 

On a lighter note, some made fun of the branding saying ‘Assistant with Bard sounds like "Assistant to the Regional Manager" from Office.