Google's Bard AI Chatbot Upgraded: Now Supports Plugin Functionality

Google announced updates to its Google Bard AI assistant on Tuesday, including integration with Google applications such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights, as well as a feature that allows fact-checking of Bard's answers through web content. It also added language support for over 40 languages. Notably, Bard's new "Double-Check Button" is designed to combat inaccurate information or fabricated content generated by Bard (commonly referred to as "hallucinations" in the AI field). This is an acknowledgment of Bard's usual lack of accuracy and inability to serve as a reliable factual reference. Here is Google's description: "Starting today, you can double-check Bard's answers more easily using Bard's 'Google it' button. When you click the 'G' icon, Bard will read the answer and evaluate if there is content on the web to confirm it. When a statement can be evaluated, you can click on the highlighted phrase and learn more about the supporting or opposing information found through search." To use the double-check feature, users can click on a small "G" icon below Bard's results. Bard will search the web and highlight sentences that match its output in green. Bard statements that contradict Google search results will be highlighted in pink. According to our experiments, the double-check button enhances some statements but does not always capture logical flaws in its output. In addition, the update introduces Bard Extensions, an optional feature that allows the AI assistant to extract content from Google's other services and integrate it into Bard conversations. For example, Bard can read emails stored in Gmail and extract travel dates for trip planning or summarize resume documents stored in Google Drive. Google states that Bard can also provide real-time flight and hotel information, offer airport navigation with Google Maps, or suggest videos on a specific topic. Due to the possibility of AI models accessing sensitive information or documents, Google states that content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive will not be reviewed by human reviewers, nor will it be used for advertising or training future versions of the Bard AI model. It is worth emphasizing that the integration extensions for each application can be individually enabled or disabled through the new "Extensions" tab in the Bard interface. While some experts believe (our own tests also indicate) that Google Bard may be slightly inferior in capabilities compared to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 subscription AI assistant, Google's ability to leverage its application integrations is unmatched by OpenAI, although ChatGPT's plugins can provide similar functionality in certain cases. Microsoft is also pursuing application integration through its AI Copilot platform. Google states that its new updates are still powered by Google's PaLM 2 language model, although there are rumors of an upcoming more powerful AI model called Gemini.