Google adds plugins to Bard with its own apps: Gmail, Docs, Drive & more

Google announced the latest addition to its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Bard, adding the ability for users to link their entire suite of Google apps to the chatbot. By doing so, users can extract information from their stored documents and spreadsheets and access public Google services, such as Maps and YouTube, within Bard Answers.

The move marks Google's first step to keep pace with rival tech company OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT regarding plugin usage on the platform. However, in a roundtable with the media, Amar Subramanya, vice president of engineering at Google, refrained from offering a timeline on when the applicability of such add-ons would also be extended to third parties.

Plugins, mini versions of applications that can be integrated into different software platforms, offer a way for applications to communicate with each other. For example, a video conferencing application can use the plugin of a calendar application used by a user to seamlessly integrate the latter's schedules.

On Tuesday, Google said the latest version of its Bard chatbot, which integrates its own apps as plugins, has also been updated to a new version of its underlying large language model (LLM), Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). The first release of plugins will be available in English only, while Bard Conversations can also be shared between users to continue collaborative conversations.

Subramanya also confirmed that the new version of Bard will now offer image-based queries and responses in more than 40 languages, support that Google had announced on July 13. The Indian languages included in this support are Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

While this supports popular Google services, Bard remains behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. The latter started rolling out support for third-party plugins beginning March 23 and, on August 28, also introduced ChatGPT Enterprise. The latter claimed to offer data privacy to paying enterprise customers by implementing ChatGPT for internal or business use cases, and the company stated in a blog post that the company's data would not be used to train its underlying LLMs.

Google also made a similar claim in its announcement on Tuesday. In a blog post, Yury Pinsky, director of product management at Bard, added that despite integrating content plugins stored in users' email accounts (which carries huge privacy implications), Bard will not use the data to display ads or train the underlying LLM. "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… You're always in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these extensions," he said.

Subramanya, at the roundtable, added, "We are very transparent with users in terms of what data gets collected, and giving them control over the data."