HUGE Bard Update: The Future of Google is Now AI

So Google recently made a massive update to its Bard chatbot, which makes it so much more useful. And although I'm recording this video, when the news is only a few hours old, there's already people on X sharing cool ways to use these new features inside of Bard. So let's dig in. So the biggest update that they announced was that they're launching Bard extensions in English. Bard can now find and show relevant information from Google tools like Gmail Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Flights and Hotels. And it will even combine information across multiple sources with its responses. It says here that 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. They also added the feature to easily double check the responses that Bard shared with you. So when you get a response, it will highlight the things in green that Google Search was able to confirm and it will highlight in sort of this yellow orangey color the things that Google found conflicting information around. You can now also share conversations that you had in Bard with other people, and when they get the link to that conversation that you already had, they're able to then continue the conversation and use your existing conversation as a starting point. So let's go ahead and jump right into Bard and play around with some of this as well as test some of the cool use cases that other people have shared over on X. So one thing to note is these extensions only work on the non Google Workspace accounts. I normally use Google with my mattwolf.com Google workspace account. But in order to get this to work these new extension features, I had to use one of my older Gmail accounts to actually see the extension. So if you are on one of the Google Workspace accounts, it doesn't seem that these features are in there quite yet. So when I first log in, I get this pop up here. Introducing Bard Extensions. Bard meets Google Workspace. Quickly get what you need from Gmail. Get summaries of content from documents and PDFs. Google respects your privacy. Double check Bard's response. This is all stuff that was in that news release that we just looked at and we are in Bard and I noticed there's a little puzzle piece image up here. It says extensions. Let's go ahead and click on and it says extend your reach. Bard's extensions can now access information from YouTube, maps, flights and hotels to save time, create plan and more. So let's go ahead and click let's go so by default, it turned on Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Maps and YouTube. Let's go ahead and turn on Google Workspace as well to be able to search within Gmail Drive and Docs. It asked me to connect to Google Workspace, so let's go ahead and do it. And we should be good to go on our extensions. Now we'll click back to new chat and the two people that I've come across today that have shared some really interesting, interesting use cases for this new Bard have been my good friend Chris Castanova over here on X, as well as Paul Cuver over here on X. So I'm going to use some of their examples and test some of the ideas that they shared. Now, some of the ideas that Chris shared are from September 8th, which is actually before this extension's release for Bard, but they're things that I haven't tried yet. So I'm going to try some things that seemingly worked pretty well inside of Bard even before this extensions release. For example, Chris shared that you can actually submit a meme into Google Bard, and Bard will actually help you understand the meaning of that meme. So if you come across something, it just feels totally over your head. Throw it into Bard and see what happens. So I came across this meme of Kermit the Frog. Let's go ahead and toss it into Bard and see what Bard thinks of it. Just drag and drop the image right here into the chat box. Explain why this meme is funny. The meme is funny because it is relatable to many people. Kermit the Frog is a character from the Muppets, and he is often seen as a symbol of boredom and procrastination. The image captures the feeling of putting off a task until the last minute and then having to wait even longer because you're not quite ready to start yet. If you want, you could pause the video and read the rest of the explanation, but it's pretty good. Now, there's this G button down here that says double check response. If I click on that, it'll search Google, evaluate Bard statements. And this one found no results. So this wasn't actually based on any sort of search, it just interpreted the picture. Chris also recommends Bard for DIY type stuff. For instance, uploading a food item or something like socks, and then asking Bard how to recreate that. So, for instance, here's an image of a cheeseburger. Let's see what happens if I upload it and ask it to give me a recipe. Toss it in here. How can I Recreate this food. To recreate the triple cheeseburger in the image, you will need the following ingredients. Three hamburger patties, three slices of American cheese. Actually think it's a double cheeseburger, but I'll let that slide. One sesame seed bun, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise. And then it goes on to give me the instructions on how to cook it. And there we go. Let's go ahead and double check the response from Google. You can see that it highlighted three slices of American cheese. If I click over that, it actually found some similar content on Reddit. If I click over there are many different types of cheese that work well on cheeseburgers. Click on that. It found a website food and wine that it got that information from. And then there's some related topics down here. How to make a triple cheeseburger. What are the ingredients in a triple burger? What's in a triple cheeseburger? I really think that's a double cheeseburger, but other than the three meat patties part, I think it got the ingredients pretty dang right. In this same thread, Chris also goes on to say that Bard is really good at improving things like images. You can give it an image and that will actually give you an improved prompt to go and reprompt that image as well as with code. It's not amazing at writing code right from scratch, but it's really good at improving code. So if you give it code and ask it to critique or improve that code, Bard is really good at that. But let's talk about some of the features that are new that they just added. Let's jump over to this thread from Paul Couvert here where he suggests Bard can now summarize your Gmail emails. You can also access your Google Docs, slides and sheets. So let's have it summarize something from my email inbox. Let's try a prompt like what are the recent updates from my kids school in my email? Here's some recent updates from your kid's school in your email. You Belong week is coming up on September 18th through 22nd. The PTA is having a membership drive Roundup tickets are on sale now. Heartland Swimming Association Aquafest is on October 17. There are several community organizations offering enrichment opportunities for kids. And then it actually points me to some of the emails that were used for this response that it gave me. So it just searched directly in my email for all the announcements from my kids school as well as the swim team that my daughter's on. Art is also Good at helping you find flights. So for example, what are the cheapest flights with no stops from San Diego to Maui in October? Searching Google flights, I found a few round trip flights with no stops from San Diego to Maui departing October 4th and returning on October 6th. I mean, that's way too short of a trip for Maui, but at least we got one of the directions. Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian airlines. Damn. Only 237 bucks round trip. I mean that's really not that bad. But again, who would go to Maui and leave on the 4th and come back on the 6th? That's just ludicrous. And also find places on Google Maps for you. So for example, if I type I'm going to be in the Lower east side of New York next week. What are the highest rated pizza places in the area? It's going to search Google Maps for me. Here are some of the highest rated pizza places in Lower east side of New York according to Google Maps. Saloogi's Pizza, Uncle Sam's Pizza, Alfonso's Pizzeria, Scar's Pizza and Slice Joint. If you know the Lower east side of New York, you can confirm or deny these results. Chris Castelve points out that you can also have it. Book hotels for you. Help me book a hotel in the Lower east side of New York next week. Here are some highly rated hotels on the Lower east side of New York. Doubletree, Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo, Madison Less Hotel. Book the Holiday Inn for me. All right, so I need the following information. Check in and check out date, number of guests, room type. Let's do check in next Wednesday, check out on Friday. One guest king bed. Now you can see it's using Google Hotels and it gives me the links directly to where I can book along with images from each of the hotels, the prices for the hotels. I could click on the Holiday Inn Express here and it'll take me to where I can actually book the hotel. Then if I ask it a question like what are some interesting facts about the James Webb Telescope? You can see it pulls up all these facts. But once again I want to confirm these facts. So let's click on double check response. It's going to search Google for me and you can see it highlighted in this sort of greenish color. It's a little bit hard to see because I use dark mode. The green and the brown would stand out a little bit better if I was using light mode. But you could see the ones in green. It confirmed on NASA's website here. This one's confirmed by NASA by the webtelescope.org so you can actually see where it confirmed this information. James Webb discovery webtelescope.org and then down here, this brown one, the JWST is so sensitive that it can detect the heat signature of a bee from a distance of 24 miles away. If I click on that one, Google search didn't find relevant content. Consider researching further to assess the statement. So it's basically telling me here's a fact about it, but I'm not totally sure. And then it gives me some related searches that will search Google for me. Now, if I actually want to share this chat thread and let somebody else view my chat or even continue where I left off on the chat, I can click this button that says share and export. Click share and create a public link. Here's the public link. Anybody can use it. If I copy this, let's go ahead and open it in a new incognito window here. Paste that in. You can see here's my chip that I just had. And then I can actually continue this chat if I was to then sign in and click continue. So these are some really amazing new features that are in Bard. A couple other pieces of information about Bard. It has not moved over to the new Gemini model, which is supposed to be so much larger than Palm 2 and GPT4, but right now it's still using the Palm 2 model from Google. As of right now, it's one of the few chatbots that will actually search the web to pull up as up to date relevant information as possible. Right now you can't do that with ChatGPT, you can't do that with Anthropics. Claude Perplexity will do that. But as of right now, I think Bard is the best at doing that. And even the way it fact checks itself helps you make sure that the information that you're getting from it is actually relevant and legit information that you can feel comfortable sharing because it's helping cite the source and you can click right over to the source and find where the information was shared. And not only does it share the link to the source, if I click on the source, it will actually highlight the section of that page for me where it found that information. So I don't have to go through and read the whole article to find how it found that. It just points it right to me. Also, unlike ChatGPT and unlike Claude, there is no pro plan for this. You can just use it. It's freely available to Google users right now. Again, it's not available yet on the upgraded workspace plans. But if you just have a regular Google Gmail free account with Google Drive and that sort of stuff, you can use this right now. You can get the extensions and it connects to all of your tools. I want to do one more experiment here that's not based on anything I've seen on X or anything like that. I'm just curious how well it works with sheets. So one last experiment before we wrap up here. What was my latest Google Sheets spreadsheet? It's looking in Google Workspace now. It pulled up some documents. These aren't necessarily sheets. Let's go ahead and reword it. What was my latest spreadsheet? See if it can sort down to just the spreadsheets. So it's struggling a little to find just the spreadsheets. It's finding documents for me, but not specifically the Google Sheets for me. But just for fun, let's go ahead and say give me a short step by step of the process in Hustle and Flowchart Podcast process. Let's see if it'll actually break out the steps for me here. Record the episode Add episode to Dropbox Edit Cleanup audio file Put it in completed folder Write show notes Create featured image Upload to Libsyn embed player on WordPress mail list when show goes live so there you go. It's it actually looked inside of this document for me and then broke down the process. If I open up the actual document, you can see it's a much longer document with a lot more steps. It just gave me the overview of it, so I'll definitely be putting Bard through its motions and testing it more and more. And as I come across new cool use cases for it, I plan to do another Bard update in the future to show you all the cool ways that I've come across that you can use it. But for right now I wanted to give you an update, let you know that these new Bard features exist and give you the opportunity to go jump in and play around with them yourself because they're pretty cool from a usefulness perspective. Bard is definitely catching up with Chat, GPT and Claude because right now it's the best one at actually using your data, as well as searching the Internet for additional information and context so you can check it out. Bard.google.com and if you want to make sure you stay in the loop with all of the latest cool AI tools as well as AI news, check out FeatureTools IO. I recently just added a dark mode here which was one of my most requested features so check that out. Maybe it'll make you want to use the site more so it doesn't make your eyes burn. I don't know, but I keep it up to date almost every single day with all the latest tools and latest news in the AI space. And if you like videos like this, you want to stay up to date on the latest news in the AI space, as well as get cool tutorials on how to do stuff, see some fun AI challenges, and learn about new tools all the time. 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