In an effort to convince consumers that generative AI is beneficial and not hazardous or just a fad, Google announced on Tuesday that it had incorporated Gmail, YouTube, and other technologies into its Bard chatbot.

The dominant search engine was unaware that OpenAI had published ChatGPT and partnered with Microsoft to make its capabilities available to consumers globally, despite having quietly developed AI capabilities for years.

After that, Google quickly released its own Bard chatbot early this year, making it accessible in more than 40 languages and overcoming authorities’ fears about data protection in Europe.

The firm said that their enhanced chatbot would enable customers to perform new activities like distill a complicated series of emails into its major points or use Google Maps to identify the most efficient route to a vacation location.

According to the company, these so-called Bard Extensions would also be able to extract essential information from documents stored on Google Docs and Google Drive, including PDFs.

With a new button that compares Bard output with the outcomes of a Google search query on the same topic, indicating disparities, the new powers would also assist reveal inaccurate responses.

The so-called “hallucinations” or poor responses that are a continual risk when utilizing Bard, ChatGPT, or Microsoft’s Bing should perhaps calm individuals who are frightened off by this.

Bard’s new features closely resemble Microsoft’s AI-powered Office 365 software services, although those are more expensive for users and are not accessible through the Bing chatbot.

A pop-up on the Bard webpage assured users who were concerned about their privacy that the new powers would only access personal information “with your permission.”

It was said that any scraping of private information from Google’s office applications, including Docs, Drive, and Gmail, would not be used to target advertisements, train Bard, or be seen by human reviewers.

The business stated in a blog post that “you’re always in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these extensions, and you can turn them off at any time.”

The launch of the new product comes as industry data indicates that usage of ChatGPT has been declining over the previous few months, raising questions about the viability of generative AI chatbots.

Additionally, Microsoft’s search engine’s earlier this year inclusion of the Bing chatbot had little effect on Google’s overwhelming search supremacy.

Governments and tech firms have increased spending on new products, research, and infrastructure because they strongly believe that generative AI is the next major development in technology.