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Google has today announced a bunch of new features for Bard, the tech giant’s reply to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While Google’s contender had a rough start, the latest update can help the company regain its podium position in the ongoing AI race.
The generative AI chatbot now has browser extensions for Google apps that pull data into user’s chat conversations. The extensions are for YouTube, Google Flights, Google Maps, and Google Drive, Google Docs, and Gmail, if you grant Bard permission to access your data.
The promising features are right there at the top right corner of the Bard screen, and you can also quickly select an extension by typing “@” followed by the extension’s name in the prompt.
Furthermore, users can now upload images with Google Lens, get Google Search images in responses, and modify Bard’s responses to be simpler, longer, shorter, more conversational or professional, and in all 40+ supported languages too.
AI chatbots are infamous for their nature of making up stuff but Google seems to have found a potential solution to the problem with Bard. The Google update notes that, ‘with the power of Google Search, the [G] button can help users double-check Bard’s responses. Moving on, Google says users can now ask Bard to find and bring together information from their Gmail inbox.
While these features sound enticing and a leap forward in human-machine communication, several red flags have been raised regarding the company’s intention. A recent exposé by Geoffrey A Fowler of The Washington Post poses a thought-provoking question: “Which data of ours is and isn’t off limits?” The investigative piece takes a deep dive into how the Valley companies including Google leech on user data and there’s not much you can do about it.
