(San Francisco) Google announced Tuesday that Bard, its generative conversation for artificial intelligence, can now connect to other company services – email, YouTube, Maps (mapping), etc. – another step in the race for deployment this technology.
Posted at 4:05 p.m.
“For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that requires multiple tabs), you can ask Bard to pull the appropriate data for everyone in Gmail, search for flights and hotels, and check the drive to the airport in Google Maps and even watch videos from YouTube about activities there – all in the same conversation,” says a press release from the American company.
The internet giant has been developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems for years, but was surprised by the success of ChatGPT (OpenAI) in late 2022 and the February launch of Microsoft’s new Bing, its engine research with generative AI capabilities.
At the same time, Google launched Bard, a dialog that can generate all types of text (editorials, articles, guides, dialogues, etc.) upon simple query in everyday language, like ChatGPT.
The new tool, called Bard Extensions, introduced on Tuesday, can also extract data from Google Docs and Google Drive (storage), including documents in PDF format, the company said.
It is also intended to help users eliminate “hallucinations” when the program does not have an answer to the question asked and invents one – because it works thanks to a language model: it does not “understand” what the words mean.
A new button, Google It, lets you compare Bard results with results from a Google search on the same topic and report any discrepancies.
Major technology companies, led by Microsoft and Google, are rapidly implementing generative AI capabilities in their online software (Office, Code, Search, Email, etc.) to turn it into a kind of personal assistant.
At the same time, they must overcome the objections of regulators, especially European ones, since this latest generation of AI is even more worrying than previous ones in terms of data confidentiality, the risk of use for harmful purposes (fraud, disinformation) or deletions. of jobs.
A window on Bard’s website states that the new “extensions” will only access personal data “with your permission.”
And any extraction of personal content from Docs, Drive, or Gmail will not be used for targeted advertising, Bard training, or review by company employees.