Bardis Google’s snazzy new AI-powered assistant. It may not be the first on the scene, or the service that popularized AI chatbots, but Google has been hard at work improving Bard’s capabilities. Recent developments includeenhanced reasoning and mathwithPython codeand support for exporting tables to Google Sheets. Additional improvements will come in the form of extensions, and we now have our first look at them.
Bard was a major point of interest for Google during theannual I/O developer conferenceearlier this year, where the company revealed plans to help you get more done with Bard using integrations with first-party Google services and third party services like Adobe Firefly. The Firefly extension, specifically, would allow users to generate customized images using textual prompts, much like the Midjourney AI. We have seen none of these extensions in action, but9to5Googlecould catch a fleeting glimpse of what’s in store.
Extensions are the latest addition to the Bard UI
Although none of the extensions were functional yet, the UI seems to be ready. 9to5Google says extensions will live in the puzzle piece icon in the upper right corner of Bard’s web UI. All the extensions are listed in a grid view with a brief description, suggested prompt, an active/inactive indicator and a checkbox, presumably to enable and disable each. For starters, Bard users should have access to the same extensions Google mentioned on stage at I/O:
These extensions should make Bard’s responses more resourceful when providing historical data like flight pricing, usual traffic congestion in an area, etc. Since the UI is ready, we believe Bard extensions are right around the corner, bringing the Google AI closer to rivals like ChatGPT which already uses plug-ins to supplement the user experience. With the added advantage of integration with first-party Google products like Workspace, Bard has immense potential to surge ahead in the ongoing AI race.
