Why Google Bard Extensions Matters
Google wants to build one generative AI platform to rule them all. On September 19, Google announced that it is integrating its Bard gen AI tool with Google apps ranging from Gmail to Google Maps. The feature, Bard extensions, is Google’s attempt to accelerate user uptake of Google’s answer to ChatGPT, which launched the gen AI arms race with its release in November 2022. In fact, ChatGPT has seen a decline in its popularity. What does this news mean to marketers?
What Google Announced
With Extensions, Bard can find and show users relevant information from the Google tools people use every day, such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels. Notably, Bard is connected to these apps even when the information someone needs is across multiple apps and services. Essentially Bard becomes a personal assistant whether someone is composing an email or trying to retrieve data from a document buried deep within Google Docs.
As Google noted in a blog post, “For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that takes up many tabs), you can now ask Bard to grab the dates that work for everyone from Gmail, look up real-time flight and hotel information, see Google Maps directions to the airport, and even watch YouTube videos of things to do there — all within one conversation.”
In addition, you can use Bard’s “Google it” button to double-check its answers more easily. 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 Google It button is noteworthy because Bard, like other large language models, can be prone to providing wrong answers to questions, and verifying the accuracy of information has not always been easy.
Why the News Matters
Google’s Bard gen AI tool was rushed to market after the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI made Google look like a slow mover. But Bard was criticized for being less effective than ChatGPT, and indeed Google has been fighting an uphill battle against first mover OpenAI. But by integrating Bard into commonly used apps like Gmail, Google is leaning into its own advantage: scale and breadth of product offerings. Recently, Google integrated AI into Search – where Google owns a commanding leadership position – through Generative Search Experience. By offering Bard and SGE, though, as separate products, Google risks confusing the market. To wit, when do you use Bard, and when do you use SGE?
It should be noted that ChatGPT had previously announced a plug-ins that allow the chatbot to gain access to updated information and third-party services from other companies, including Expedia, Instacart and OpenTable.
The news matters to marketers because it shows the steps that Big Tech bellwethers are taking to integrate gen AI into all forms of content creation. Bard Extensions also gives marketers more ways to integrate Bard into their work. For instance, a marketing team at a tech company can Bard Extensions to generate personalized email campaigns for their customers. Bard can use the customer’s purchase history and other data to generate emails that are relevant to their interests. Or a marketing team could use Bard Extensions to generate video ideas and write video scripts for their YouTube channel. Bard could help them to create videos that are relevant to their target audience and that are likely to perform well on YouTube. Having Bard integrated into all these apps can make it easier for marketers to generate content across the entire customer journey.
What Marketers Should Do
As always, we believe it’s important for marketers to incorporate forms of gen AI into their daily workflows. But we strongly advise against entrusting AI with the task of drafting significant amounts of written content or generating images. This caution stems from ethical and legal concerns regarding AI potentially appropriating and utilizing the creative output of the originator without proper attribution or compensation. We also believe that algorithms will increasingly penalize detectable AI-generated content because ultimately the algorithms need human-produced content to maintain their relevance. Moreover, using AI to simply create content “just because we can” contributes to a broader problem: wasted content that contributes to digital waste. Contact us to learn how we can help you waste less and grow more. Learn more about our services here.