Bard Can Now Connect to Your Google Apps

Now you can access Gmail, Docs, Drive, and other Google apps and double-check responses with Bard. Here’s how to use these new features.

Source: Pexels

Hi guys! I just wanted to remind you that those who become paid subscribers to my Substack till this Friday (September 22nd) can redeem my new Udemy course: ChatGPT Unleashed: Master GPT-4 & Prompt Engineering. You only need to send me an email to frank@thepycoach.com after becoming a paid subscriber and I’ll send you a free coupon.

In case you’re still unsure about subscribing, here’s a free article for all of you about a recent announcement Google made (that I think is good news!).

Google made some updates to its most capable model — PaLM 2. That means amazing new features for Bard!

Probably the coolest feature Bard has now is the ability to connect to Google apps and services through extensions. This means that Bard can now connect to your Gmail, Google Docs, and Drive to get things done quickly without having to copy/paste text every time you use a Google product.

In this article, we’ll see how to enable extensions, how to use them, and other cool features that now Bard supports.

How to enable Bard’s extensions

Go to Bard and log in to your account. Then, on the upper-right corner click on the extensions icon.

Then you’ll see the extensions below. Some of these extensions are enabled by default. Google Workspace isn’t one of them, so in case you want Bard to have access to your Gmail, Drive, and Docs, consider enabling it.

Let’s start a new chat to test these extensions.

Connecting Bard to Google Apps

Once we enable the extensions, we only need to describe which Google product we wish to use in our prompt.

Say you’ve been disconnected from the internet for the past weeks and want to quickly catch up on the weekly emails I send. Bard can provide a small summary of the latest emails.

As you can see, next to the Bard logo there’s a new space destined for the extension being used for the response (in this case Google Workspace). If you open it, you’ll see what actions Bard is doing behind the scenes.

After analyzing the response, I have to say that Bard did a good job at summarizing the latest emails from The PyCoach, but I also noticed that Bard made a small mistake because my ChatGPT course isn’t actually free as mentioned by Bard (it’s free if you become a paid subscriber in the next 2 days … but that doesn’t mean it’s a free course for everyone)

Anyway, in case you want to know more about an email, you can click on one of the emails that Bard used for the previous response.

But that’s not all. There’s more you can do with Gmail! You can compose an email reply, find out when was the last time a contact sent you an email, summarize emails, get the time of an event, etc.

Besides Gmail, you can also ask Bard to connect to your Drive or Docs to get summaries from PDFs, insights from documents, etc.

Things get more interesting when you combine different Google apps. For example, you can use Bard to plan a trip considering the dates that work for your Gmail contacts, then look up real-time flights using Google Flights and hotel information using Google Hotels.

Here’s a cool example extracted from the Google Blog.

Source: Google Blog

Note: According to Google, If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads, or used to train the Bard model. For more information about this, check this article.

Now Bard can help you double-check responses

Bard's responses now include a “Google it” button (“G” icon) to double-check its answers. After clicking on the button, Bard will read its response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it. 

Say you ask Bard how to learn Python from scratch. You get your response but aren’t completely sure whether the response provided is correct. 

If you click on the “G” button located at the bottom of the response, Bard will evaluate as many statements as possible and highlight in green those that have supporting information by Google Search 

and highlight in another color those that have contradicting information found by Google Search or when Google Search didn’t find relevant content.

Whenever you want to learn more about the highlighted statements, just click on the links to the sources provided (if available).

Finally, another good feature that comes with this update is the ability to build on others’ conversations with Bard. Now when someone shares a Bard chat with you through a public link, you can continue the conversation as you want. 

That’s it! For more information about this update, check here.