Google Bard extensions are here! ✨

Hey — It’s Hussein 👋

Exciting day today.

I am in SF at TechCrunch Disrupt and will be taking the stage with Carey Smith (VC at Unorthodox Ventures), Erica Jain (CEO of Healthie), and Dominic-Madori Davis (Sr. Reporter at TechCrunch) to talk about bootstrapping, startups and AI.

Big news from Google this week. They released another update to Bard, and it truly feels like a big leap forward for AI assistants.

Let’s take a closer look at what is now live in Bard. ✨

Before we begin… a big thank you to:

Bard extensions

They are finally here! Think of extensions like ChatGPT Plugins. They are a way to extend the functionality of Bard and, more importantly, integrate Bard with other tools and services.

For this initial release, the only extensions available are Google products: Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, Flights, Hotels, and YouTube. 3rd party extensions are coming soon.

Here are some key points worth knowing:

1. Google made it clear that sharing your data with Bard via extensions does not train the model on the data coming from the extensions.

2. Unlike ChatGPT, which limits you to 3 active plugins at a time, Bard lets you turn all of them on at the same time.

3. You can force specify an extension request by typing the @ symbol, which opens a menu. With ChatGPT, this functionality is non-existent. You can ask ChatGPT to use a plugin to answer you, but it’s hit or miss.

4. With all of the Google extensions on, it’s starting to feel like I have a universal search for my stuff.

5. This is the beginning of Bard becoming a true assistant. I wouldn’t be surprised if, a few months from now, we will start to see Bard inside of Google Home products.

6. I use Gmail as my email provider for my personal, GPT Hacks, Money Minx and Arta Finance. Unfortunately, Bard can’t access all of them unless I sign out and sign back into another account.

7. Third-party extensions were announced at Google I/O 2023 but are not available yet. I am curious to see what happens when those roll out and if we will continue to be able to use as many extensions as we want or if there will be a limit.

Bard hallucination checker

When you press ChatGPT or Bard about the source of information they give you, they will own up to making things up, what we call hallucinations.

Google is making a feature out of asking Bard to double-check itself by adding a Google It button at the end of every response. Tap on this button, and it will check its response and highlight sources and errors.

Other Bard updates

A few more updates worth noting:

1. When you share a conversation, the recipient can now continue the conversion with their own Bard. This is similar to how ChatGPT works.

2. They extended the support for image search and other extras within Bard to 40 languages.

3. They didn’t provide much detail on this, but they also improved the underlying model that powers Bard. This means it should be better at giving you answers.

How to access Bard extensions

When you open Bard, it should show a message about extensions and help you turn them on. If you don’t see them, tap on the puzzle icon (top right of your screen) to open the extensions page and enable them.

Bard extensions use cases

It’s still early to know the true power of extensions.

I have a few ideas to get you started and will follow up soon on more business use cases.

1. Ask if there are any emails you should follow up on.

2. Summarize the last five emails you received.

3. Search for information buried in one of your emails.

4. Summarize or find a Google Doc.

5. Help you look for a flight, hotel, and restaurant for your next business trip.

6. Help you find details about an event you are attending.

7. Summarize a group of emails received from a company.

With all of these updates, I think I will have much more use for Google Bard. I don’t think this will take away from my ChatGPT. Instead, it will add more AI usage overall.

I currently mainly use Bard for market research. Now, I can see myself using it more as a search tool for my emails and docs as well as research for flights and h

Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have a lot of catching up to do. The space is only getting hotter and more exciting! I am still waiting to see if Microsoft is going to re-release Cortana but powered by GPT-4! I’ll continue to watch the space and keep you updated on what’s happening.

See you next Wednesday — Hussein ✌️

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