Google is introducing Bard, its artificially intelligent chatbot, to other members of its virtual family, adding Gmail, Maps and YouTube, in an effort to protect itself from competitive threats posed through generation through Open AI and Microsoft.
Bard’s expanded features announced Tuesday will be delivered through an English-only extension that will allow users to allow the chatbot to leverage data embedded in their Gmail accounts, as well as get directions from Google Maps and locate useful videos on YouTube. The extension will also allow Bard to retrieve data in Google Flights and extract data from documents stored in Google Drive.
Google promises to protect user privacy by prohibiting human reviewers from viewing potentially sensitive data Bard obtains from Gmail or Drive, while promising that the knowledge will not be used in connection with the company’s core operations in Mountain View, California. Money: sell classified ads tailored to people’s interests.
The extension is the latest progression in an ongoing war on AI sparked by the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Microsoft’s push to incorporate technology into its Bing search engine and its Microsoft 365 suite that includes its Word, Excel and Outlook apps.
ChatGPT prompted Google to publish Bard widely in March and then start testing the use of more conversational AI in its own search effects in May.
The decision to give Bard more virtual juice comes amid a high-profile lawsuit that could eventually hamper Google’s ubiquitous search engine that powers the $1. 7 trillion empire of its parent company, Alphabet Inc.
In the largest U. S. antitrust case in a quarter-century, the U. S. Justice Department alleges Google created its lucrative search monopoly by abusing its strength to stifle festival and innovation. Google claims to dominate search because its algorithms produce the results. It also states that it faces a wide variety of festivals, which become more intense with the rise of AI.
Giving Bard access to a lot of non-public data and other popular ones like Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, in theory, will make them even more useful and make more people dependent on them.
Google, for example, posits that Bard can simply help a user plan a trip to the Grand Canyon by getting dates that suit everyone, specifying other flight and hotel options, offering Maps directions, and showing a variety of informative YouTube videos. .