Exclusive Preview: Google’s Upcoming Bard Update

Google has announced the newest update to Bard, featuring the most exciting updates that will make this the smartest and most capable Bard model yet. It is designed not only to refine Bard’s linguistic capabilities across various languages and nations but also to introduce integrative features that enhance productivity by bridging Bard with popular Google apps and services.

Some key highlights include:

• Enhancements that elevate Bard’s intuitiveness and creativity.
• Introduction of Bard Extensions, allowing Bard to extract real-time information from platforms such as Maps, YouTube, Hotels, and Flights.
• Option to enable Bard to interact with information from your Gmail, Docs and Drive so you can find, summarize and answer questions across your personal content.
• The ability to collaborate on creative projects, start in one language and seamlessly continue in up to 40+ other languages and countries.
• Features to assist with in-depth coding inquiries and to explore new topics from various perspectives with heightened quality and accuracy.

Unlocking our most capable model yet

• Since its initial release in February, the feedback from our users coupled with the updates we’ve made to our PaLM2 model have accelerated Bard’s ability to be more intuitive, imaginative, and responsive than ever before in languages and countries all over the world.
• Learning from feedback, such as thumbs up and down on responses, we’ve applied state of the art reinforcement learning techniques to train the model to be more intuitive and imaginative.
• Bard now allows people to collaborate on creative projects, start in one language and continue in up to 40+ other languages and countries, ask for in-depth coding assistance, or learn about new topics from different points of view with greater quality and accuracy.
• We believe in rapid iteration and bringing the best of Bard to the world. Your feedback has helped unlock the most capable version of Bard yet for stronger collaboration.

Bring plans to life faster and easier – with Bard Extensions 

• We are taking an important step in expanding the capabilities of Bard by pulling in information from the Google apps and services you rely upon everyday.
• Bard can now retrieve and help you work with real time info from Maps, YouTube, Hotels and Flights. You can pull together what you need across information sources and bring ideas to life easier and faster. These extensions are enabled by default, and you can disable them any time.
• Now, you can collaborate not only with the world’s information, but also with your own, all in one place, with Bard as your creative partner. With permission, you can enable Bard to interact with information from your Gmail, Docs and Drive so you can find, summarise and answer questions across your personal content. Your Google Workspace data won’t be used to train Bard’s public model and you can disable at any time.
• The real magic of Extensions comes through in your ability to mix them together in an intuitive, natural way the same way you’d talk to a friend. We live our lives across apps and tabs, but with Extensions, Bard now has a bunch of helpers that can bring back only the info you need from those apps and services. So, instead of hours of research for flights and plans on 2/14, you can just ask Bard to look up flights on Valentine’s Day, places to buy flowers near the airport, and even write you a poem to surprise your special someone, all in one conversation.
• This is the first step in a fundamentally new capability for Bard – the ability to talk to other apps and services to provide more helpful responses. This is a very young area of AI  – we are still learning and iterating fast – but  are excited to make these features available to users and get their feedback
• We’re making this feature available in English to start with and look forward to bringing it to other languages soon.

Double-check your responses with greater confidence 

• We know that there are challenges that come with large language models — including presenting inaccurate information confidently — and we’ve done a lot of work since we launched to combat them.
• In addition, people are using AI tools to more easily understand complex topics in new ways. As you continue your learning journeys with Bard, it’s important that you feel more confident in the information generated with AI.
• With the power of Google Search, the [G] button can help you double-check Bard’s AI-generated responses by finding content that’s likely similar to or different from its statements. Starting with English, when a statement can be evaluated, you’ll see it highlighted in Bard’s response and can click to learn more.
• It’s important to note that the links provided are content found by Search and do not imply these sources informed Bard’s initial response.

Build off of conversations shared with you

• Creativity is often inspired by the work of others, and the more ideas we have to work with, the more likely we are to come up with something truly innovative. That’s why we’re making it easier for you to use conversations shared by others as a starting point for your own creative explorations.
• When someone shares a Bard conversation with you through Bard’s public link sharing feature, you can continue that conversation in your account and build off of what they started.

More popular features are now available in all supported languages

• As we continue to build Bard responsibly, we’re now expanding access to existing English language features — you can upload images with Google Lens, get Google Search images in responses, and modify Bard’s responses to be simpler, longer, shorter, more professional or more casual in all 40+ supported languages and countries.
• Having the option to modify responses to better meet your needs gives you  more control over your creative process. Using images as part of prompts unlocks a new level of creativity, and having images as part of responses can help bring ideas to life.

Sample prompts per extension (with descriptions) – which will be live on the 19th:

Extensions become even more useful when you use more than one!