Google recently announced the new features of Google Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA. With Bard, Google aims to provide helpful answers to complex questions in a natural, conversational way. One of Bard’s key features is its ability to integrate with other Google services and apps. And now we can have 40 languages in it.
In this article, we’ll look at how Google Bard can work with popular Google apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and more. Integrating Bard into these apps creates new opportunities to be more productive and get things done faster.
Overview of Google Bard
Before diving into the integrations, let’s quickly recap what Google Bard is and what it can do.
Google Bard is an AI chatbot that builds on the company’s experience with natural language processing models like LaMDA. It’s designed to understand context and have thoughtful, in-depth conversations on various topics.
Some key features of Bard include:
- Conversational responses: Bard aims to provide helpful information in a natural back-and-forth dialogue, not just short answers.
- Drawing on web resources: Bard scours the web to provide up-to-date, high-quality information in its responses.
- Citing sources: Bard quotes its sources so users can verify the information it provides.
- Adapting to context: Bard looks at conversational history and your query to provide responses tailored to you.
- Open-domain: Bard can discuss nearly any topic, not just narrow pre-defined ones.
Let’s look at how integrating Bard into other Google services can enhance productivity and streamline workflows.
Bard in Gmail
Gmail is one of Google’s most widely used products, with over 1.5 billion active users. Integrating Bard into Gmail can make composing and responding to emails much faster.
When writing a new email in Gmail, Bard can provide autocomplete suggestions as you type to speed up the process. For example, if you start a sentence, “The deadline for that project is…” Bard may automatically fill in a date related to a discussed project deadline in your email history.
For responding to incoming emails, Bard can generate reply summaries or even full email draft responses based on the content of the received email. This could save you time having to type out routine answers.
Bard can scan incoming emails and surface the most important ones in your inbox. And if you ask Bard questions about information in one of your emails, it can parse those emails and provide helpful answers.
Enhancing Documents with Bard
Google Docs is relied upon by millions of people for writing documents of all kinds. Bard can assist with documents in several ways.
When you’re actively editing a document in Google Docs, Bard can function like an AI co-writer and editor. For instance, you could have Bard rewrite a paragraph in a different tone or reading level. Or you could ask Bard to expand upon an idea with supporting details.
Bard can also summarize long documents for you to get the gist quickly. Simply ask Bard for the key highlights and takeaways from a 20-page proposal, and it will generate a concise summary.
For research papers and articles, Bard can provide relevant citations on topics to back up key points. No more fruitless searching for sources to cite!
Managing Your Calendar with Bard
Google Calendar is many people’s central hub for organizing meetings, appointments, and events. Bard can step in to help manage your calendar in helpful ways.
If you tell Bard about a new meeting or event you have coming up, it can automatically update your calendar. This saves you the steps of manually inputting it into your calendar.
Bard can also look at your existing calendar events and suggest optimal times to schedule new events. If your calendar is very crowded, Bard may recommend planning a meeting next week instead of trying to squeeze it in this week.
Similarly, if you need to reschedule an event, Bard can scan your calendar and recommend alternative times that work with the rest of your schedule. This takes the frustration out of rescheduling.
Boosting Productivity with Bard & Drive
Google Drive houses all your important documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Bard can integrate with Drive to boost your productivity.
To start, Bard can search your Drive content much faster than you could manually. So, if you need to find that quarterly report from last October, ask Bard to locate it.
Bard can also summarize and describe documents in Drive for you. So, if you need a refresher on a specific presentation or report, Bard can review it and brief you on the contents.
For collecting information, Bard can generate new documents and send them to your Drive account. For example, you could say, “Bard, make me a one-page summary of the key events of the French Revolution and save it to Drive.” Bard can quickly create and add documents to your Drive with ease.
Streamlining Work Across Google Apps with Bard
When you put together all the integrations we’ve covered, Bard has the potential to streamline workflows that utilize multiple Google apps significantly.
For instance, Bard could add an event to your Calendar, include relevant files from Drive in the Calendar invite, draft initial emails to invitees pulled from Contacts, and set reminders – all from one request.
Or imagine you’re doing market research and say: “Bard, make a presentation with the latest info on electric vehicle sales trends and email it to the marketing team.” Bard can pull data, make a presentation in Google Slides, save it to Drive, and email – eliminating all the manual steps.
The cross-app integration abilities of Bard open new doors for being productive and getting things done faster than ever.
The Future Looks Promising
While still in the early experimental stages, Google Bard shows immense promise as an AI assistant that can meaningfully enhance workflows across Google’s suite of apps.
The potential time and energy savings from Bard’s conversational approach and cross-app integrations are enormous. As Google continues refining Bard’s capabilities, it could become an indispensable productivity tool for users of Google Workspace.
Of course, there are still challenges around accuracy and responsiveness that Google must improve upon. But the foundations they are building with Bard’s natural language processing and search abilities make it likely these issues will be ironed out.
With Google’s vast resources and leading expertise in AI, they are well-positioned to make Bard a practical digital assistant that integrates seamlessly across their ecosystem of apps. The next few years promise to be exciting as Bard evolves from an early prototype to a daily productivity booster.
Final Thoughts
The seamless integration of Google Bard across popular Google apps promises to enhance productivity and efficiency significantly. As Bard develops further and has its kinks worked out, it has immense potential as an indispensable AI assistant, much like ChatGPT. Google is well on making Bard a practical reality that simplifies and automates workflows for millions of users.
