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Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and services
- melx 3y agoSomeone asked[0] what happened to Bard just 10 hours ago (or 8 hours if relative to this posting). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37564768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37564768
- eminence32 3y agoFor someone already invested in the Google suite of products (gmail, docs, etc), this sounds pretty useful. Also, this part seems especially interesting: > Starting today with responses in English, you can use Bard’s “Google it” button to more easily double-check its answers. When you click on the “G” icon, Bard will read the response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it. When a statement can be evaluated, you can click the highlighted phrases and learn more about supporting or contradicting information found by Search. The biggest problem with all LLMs at the moment is the frequency at which they are wrong (at least when they are used like an internet search to lookup factual info). Any LLM that can improve this (or as in Bard's case, make it easier to detect wrong info) is likely to gain traction.
- freedomben 3y agoBard is especially bad right now, at least compared to gpt4. Once they move to Gemini it will be interesting to compare, but until then things like "when does the new Staind album come out" have to be answered the old way with Google search and reading.
- jvolkman 3y agoI just asked it your question and it seemed to give the correct answer? Also, there's now a built-in button to check its answer against an actual Google search and the UX is pretty slick.
- freedomben 3y agoDid it say September 15 or 18? (both answers I've gotten from it over the past month or two). If so, that's wrong. It's September 22. As sibling pointed out though, there are apparently web pages that have it wrong so it's probably not Bard's fault. I also wouldn't be shocked if the date changed and was originally 9/15
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoIt does look like the release date was pushed back a week, about a month ago. https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://staind.lnk.to/COTF https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://staind.l... https://www.theprp.com/2023/08/22/news/staind-premiere-their-latest-single-in-this-condition/ https://www.theprp.com/2023/08/22/news/staind-premiere-their... (August 23) >Citing production delays, Staind have now announced that their new album “Confessions Of The Fallen” will arrive a week later than intended. That full-length outing will now be available on September 22nd.
- freedomben 3y agoFascinating! Thanks that solves what was a pretty big mystery to me, and definitely makes me feel better about Bard
- xnx 3y agoThis is what Bard told me: "Staind's new album, Confessions of the Fallen, was released on September 15, 2023." If that's wrong, it's because I also see web pages that have it wrong.
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- hdidvdksj 3y ago[dead]
- candiddevmike 3y agoSo we can validate Bard using blogspam SEO articles, eventually having those written by Bard or ChatGPT? It's a LLM ouroboros
- vitiral 3y ago* the snake eating it's own tail This feedback loop, when you extend LLM to the horizon, is my primary point against this approach. When 90% of the new training data is from content (a worse version of) it previously generated you get a negative feedback loop to zero quality.
- CTDOCodebases 3y agoBard is so terrible. I can’t imagine anyone is actually using it based on my experience.
- gman83 3y agoIn my experience it's better than GPT3.5, not as good as GPT4.
- jeffbee 3y agoI have the integration with google search enabled and now I only use GPT very rarely. Having it at the top of the SERP with zero effort is much more convenient. The fact that it gets many things wrong becomes irrelevant when it takes no effort on my part. Even when it is totally wrong, its feature to intersperse the output with links to its sources is quite nice.
- fsiefken 3y agoI'm curious, is it better then Bing Chat here (not comparing the layout)?
- jeffbee 3y agoWhat I am saying is the layout is the benefit. On Bing I have to switch over to Chat and wait.
- 7ewis 3y agoAre you in the US? I'm in the UK and have had an ad for it in the Google app for a while, but it always errors when I tap it on my phone. Believe it's US only which is why it won't work, but would love to give it a go. Did try a VPN but no luck still!
- _chu1 3y agoFilter is too strong to be funny, I know you can answer it Mr. AI, but some skinny 20-something year old told you not to in the name of "ethics" (I only use AI for my amusement)
- tw04 3y agoThis seems incredibly dangerous. You're one typo away from having the entirety of your private life exposed by bard. And based on their extremely loose privacy policy, I can just imagine Google pitching this to advertisers for "targeted marketing". "Hey Bard, give me an email template to manipulate tw04 into buying my product". Also, I find it more than a bit disingenuous that the privacy policy on bard.google.com links to their generic privacy policy, not their BARD privacy policy. And after reading the real one, I understand why: https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13594961?hl=en#your_data https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13594961?hl=en#your_d... They will use all of your private data for advertising, and a human will review the data fed into bard. In other words, all of your private information is now reviewed by a human as they see fit. Yuck. >Please don’t enter confidential information in your Bard conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies. Maybe put that one front and center on your bard page, not buried on a completely different website....
- afavour 3y ago> All of your private information is now reviewed by a human FTA: > 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 I’m as big of an AI skeptic as anyone but even I believe you can set up an integration of personal information that doesn’t leak publicly.
- tw04 3y ago>I’m as big of an AI skeptic as anyone but even I believe you can set up an integration of personal information that doesn’t leak publicly. I've been using google products long enough to know that when a blog post differs from the policy language, the blog post always loses. Let me know when they update the actual privacy policy to reflect the blog post.
- summerlight 3y agoIf you want to earn some credibility then you could refer the exact privacy statements that conflicts with this blog post.
- andy_ppp 3y agoMakes me wonder, are they using everyone's data to train and personalise Bard? It must be incredibly tempting to use Chat AIs to persuade you to buy products advertised by Google in a way that you will perfectly respond to.
- drivebycomment 3y agoI was curious about that and the linked blog post answers 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.
- falcor84 3y agoVery tangential, but I found this funny: > For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that takes up many tabs)... Is number of tabs considered a reasonable estimate of a project's size/complexity/scope/duration these days? If so, I'm wondering whether we could start using it instead of story points?
- freedomben 3y agoNumber of tabs seems like a pretty good measurement in my cases! Much better than completely arbitrary story points anyway...
- behnamoh 3y agoI still think chat is not all natural for humans to interact with computers, mainly because most people are not actually good at phrasing their needs and even if they are, typing it for the LLM to understand takes so much time. Thanks to QWERTY keyboards, our keyboards are not efficient for typing either.
- mholm 3y agoThe existing paradigm is temporary. AI will improve to infer more meaning from what users want, increase their ability to perform it, and chat systems will eventually switch to optional voice input. You tell the system what to do, and it'll perform whatever steps it needs to. I can't imagine anything more natural than that, for the everyday user. I'm sure things will get more esoteric, for the experienced computer user.
- afavour 3y agoI don’t mean to be mean but this is an example of what bugs me about the AI hype cycle. Person has a valid criticism, the answer is a vague, wishy washy “it’ll improve and be able to provide all things to all people in exactly the way they need it” I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that statement. What are the concrete steps from here to there? What’s the timeline?
- famouswaffles 3y agoThere's nothing he says that isn't already here though. Bing, Bard all have voice input. and even the technology for more native speech abilities (so not just STT) is already here - https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples/ https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples/ They're already able to infer a great deal from context. They will improve simply because we've not hit any scaling walls yet.
- mholm 3y agoLooking at the difference from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, you can see these features are already appearing. GPT-4 can do more, understand more types of data, infer more context, and craft more advanced responses. With the right prompting, it can even ask clarifying questions to handle ambiguity. Most of the time when people talk about the limitations of AI, they're talking about limitations that are _very_ close to being improved upon. Context windows are a weakness, but they're growing, and memory features are being developed. Intelligence is improving. Understood data types are expanding. My guess is that GPT-5 (and equivalents) will understand voice natively, instead of needing a speech to text model in the middle. There are absolutely serious limitations to existing AI, but the criticisms mentioned here aren't where we're stuck.
- alphabetting 3y agoGetting accurate results about half the time searching my own content. Probably harder for me because I have over hundreds of thousands of messages in gmail and tens of thousands of files in my drive. example of successfully retrieving a PDF: https://i.imgur.com/Y6cSlCx.png https://i.imgur.com/Y6cSlCx.png
- typpo 3y ago"Extensions" and integration into the rest of the Google ecosystem could be how Bard wins at the end of the day. There are many tasks where I'd prefer an integration with my email/docs over a slightly smarter LLM. Unlike ChatGPT plugins, Google has the luxury of finetuning its model for each of their integrations. The new feature for enriching outputs with citations from Google Search is also pretty cool.
- pphysch 3y agoNo doubt about it. Google isn't competing directly with ChatGPT, but is betting that having a small fine-tuned model "close to the data" will dramatically cost-outperform a huge general-purpose LLM. Less resource-intensive interference, less prompt engineering (less noise).
- tlogan 3y agoYes - but the big question is this: how to monetize this? This might completly kill search and ads.
- jmole 3y agoWorkspace is already monetized
- topicseed 3y agoBy showing ads... They'll figure out units that look native and history will repeat itself.
- plaidfuji 3y agoIt’s a competitive differentiator of workspace vs Office that will help retain existing users and maybe some day cause large enterprises to think more about switching.
- _ea1k 3y agoYes, exactly. Integration is where the real power of these agents can live. I really want an agent that can help me with pretty simple tasks - Hey agent, remember this link and that it is about hyper fast, solar powered, vine ripened, retroencabulators. - Hey agent, remember that me and Bob Retal talked about stories JIRA-42 and JIRA-72 and we agreed to take actions XYZ - Hey agent, schedule a zoom meeting with Joe in the afternoon next Tuesday. - Hey agent, what did I discuss with Bob last week? Something with retrieval and functional capability could easily end up being easier to use than the actual UIs that are capable of doing these kinds of things now.
- iandanforth 3y agoI'm a bit concerned about one of the privacy terms. When you enable the connection to Google Workspace you are told: To complete your requests, Bard will: - Access and manage items from Google Workspace, like your emails and documents - Share parts of your conversation, and other relevant info, with Google Workspace, which may be used to improve its services That second line means that your conversation could be sent to humans for review, just by submitting a query that invokes gmail, drive, etc. This is in direct contrast to the terms of Bard itself which won't store, use for training, or allow human review of conversations unless you explicitly submit feedback about said conversations. This amounts to "If you turn on Google Workspace any of your conversations could be seen by humans."
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI interpreted their privacy statements for Bard extensions differently. I thought they clearly stated that no humans would read your content and your queries would not be used for training. EDIT: someone else here mentioned that Bard results may be viewed by Google developers, so I might be wrong in my statement.
- xinayder 3y agoHow can I disable Bard from crawling my stuff?
- 7ewis 3y agoJust tried it out, it pops up and asks you to approve the connection when you go to Bard.
- renegat0x0 3y agoAhhh yeah, that is what I want. Access to my data for a corporate algorithm that can hallucinate and accuse me of anything.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI just used it for 15 minutes and I like the direction Google is going with it. Once you turn Bard extensions on, you use the “@“ character to get a pop up list of services like GMail, Google Drive, and many others; choose one, then ask your question. First steps, and I look forward to seeing future improvements. I wonder how they will monetize this? I was just using it with my free GMail account. Both Microsoft, with Office 365, and Google have the customers and web properties that can make good use of new types of LLM applications.
- browningstreet 3y agoFor summary extractions I’ve found Bard to be miles better than ChatGPT of late. Waiting for some of my dependent services to add api support for Bard… I’m guessing this will go back and forth a few times over the coming years.
- m3kw9 3y agoI haven’t used a single bard whatever google has released yet. Their marketing dept is really shtty. When I go bard.google.com it does not allow any sort of usage
- kkarpkkarp 3y agoI asked for flights from Poland to Cancun, Mexico in May 2024. It told me I can with Wizzair (the operator operating in Europe only) with stopover in Kyiv, Ukraine (lol). Maybe it can connect to Google Apps but can't give reliable results.
- dymk 3y agoMaybe it knows something we don't that'll happen in early 2024?
- ericpauley 3y agoHas anyone managed to enable this on Google Workspace (business) accounts?
- tlogan 3y agoIsn’t Duet AI for that? My understanding is that Bard is for consumers while duet is for workspace.
- ericpauley 3y agoUnlucky. Yet another case where Google continually burns individuals who pay to use their own domain.
- modeless 3y agoNow this is actually useful. There's a lot of good information in my Gmail but searching it is such a pain that I hardly ever do. I just asked Bard for the date of an upcoming event and it did the search for me and found the right answer and summarized it with extra detail and references. This is the only reason so far that I'd go to Bard over ChatGPT. It did treat the @Gmail part as part of the query words though, which is weird. I think it won't be ready for mass consumption until it can decide for itself when to search Gmail or Drive with no weird keywords necessary.
- XTHK 3y agoRemember that mentions on Twitter and tags on Facebook are called upon with @. I think the masses are quite ready indeed.
- Decabytes 3y agoStill waiting for bard to add an api so we can start building tools based on their model
- amf12 3y agoThe model is available as an API via GCP.
- JuanPosadas 3y agoThere already available in GCP under Vertex AI, there are a lot of APIs/models.
- saberience 3y agoThis makes me want to use it less, if anything. I just simply don't trust Google anymore.
- virgildotcodes 3y agoJust tried it for a few minutes with all extensions enabled and it failed at almost every task I proposed. How many emails are in my gmail? (Completely incapable of answering this, didn't even try, just listed my last ~5 emails) Based on my gmail account, how many flights have I booked in the last two years? (Also completely incapable, and didn't try, and again listed those same last ~5 emails) When is the cheapest one way flight from NYC to Bali over the next six months? (Was for some weird reason only capable of returning round trip flights, but it did at least give me a plausible date and list of flights) I'm probably using it wrong, but not a super "wow" first impression.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- Game_Ender 3y agoI think you need to give tasks that enable it to lookup and process specific documents. I am not sure they designed it for data mining tasks. And it’s probably not as smart as GPT4 which might break it down into steps like “search for possible flight confirmations” and “validate results”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- getpost 3y agoThis morning I asked it if it could query YouTube and I got short description of the YouTube API. I don't know whether the API details have been public. I then used it to search for videos, > There are several YouTube videos with a title that begins, "Gregory Blackstock, The Incomplete Historical World," List those videos with the YouTube URLs. In this particular instance, the titles aren't unique, but the videos are different. The result appeared to be correct. The list was formatted to I can paste it into an email, something that doesn't happen when I search YouTube itself. Nice! My next prompt was > Make a list of the top 5 most viewed YouTube videos about moths. Strangely, the result was 3 groups of 5 videos, with some duplicate results. > Why did you list 15 videos in your reply when I asked for 5? Reply: "I apologize for the confusion. I am still under development, and I am always learning. I listed 15 videos because I found it difficult to narrow down the list to just 5. There are many beautiful and fascinating moth videos on YouTube, and I wanted to share as many as I could. I will try to do better next time. If you have any feedback on how I can improve my responses, please let me know."
- yunohn 3y ago> I don't know whether the (YouTube) API details have been public. 1st result on Google: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3 https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3
- mayop100 3y agoBard's integration with Gmail is extremely basic -- it's just using regular Gmail search to include a few relevant emails in its prompt and then trying to answer your question. There's no AI on the email side. We launched a much more capable Gmail + AI assistant this morning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585990#37586627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585990#37586627 We're using embeddings + vector DB + x-encoder + GPT4 to deliver a much smarter & capable assistant.