Google’s Bard Just Got More Powerful. It’s Still Erratic.

This week, Bard — Google’s competitor to ChatGPT — got an upgrade.

One interesting new feature, called Bard Extensions, allows the artificial intelligence chatbot to connect to a user’s Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive accounts.

(Google also gave Bard the ability to search YouTube, Google Maps and a few other Google services, and it introduced a tool that would let users fact-check Bard’s responses. But I’m going to focus on the Gmail, Docs and Drive integrations, because the ability to ask an A.I. chatbot questions about your own data is the killer feature here.)

Bard Extensions is designed to address one of the most annoying problems with today’s A.I. chatbots, which is that while they’re great for writing poems or drafting business memos, they mostly exist in a vacuum. Chatbots can’t see your calendar, peer into your email inbox or rifle through your online shopping history — the kinds of information an A.I. assistant would need in order to give you the best possible help with your daily tasks.

Google is well positioned to close that gap. It already has billions of people’s email inboxes, search histories, years’ worth of their photos and videos, and detailed information about their online activity. Many people — including me — have most of their digital lives on Google’s apps and could benefit from A.I. tools that allow them to use that data more easily.

I put the upgraded Bard through its paces on Tuesday, hoping to discover a powerful A.I. assistant with new and improved abilities.

What I found was a bit of a mess. In my testing, Bard succeeded at some simpler tasks, such as summarizing an email. But it also told me about emails that weren’t in my inbox, gave me bad travel advice and fell flat on harder analytical tasks.