Make Google Bard your assistant: How to find emails, documents with Bard

Google Bard is one of the best AI tools out there to get everything from ideas to entire pieces of code written out for you. While Bard wasn’t the first in the game (that would be OpenAI’s ChatGPT), it did feature a key advantage over other AI chatbots, and that was access to updated, real-time information over the internet.

However, with ChatGPT also recently getting access to the web for more updated results, it is time for Bard (and Bard users) to step up its game. One way you can do that is with Bard’s range of extensions.

Bard Extensions offer a number of tools that you can use to let it connect seamlessly with other Google apps and services. Why? Because this lets you turn Bard into your personal assistant. This means, you can simply ask Bard to find an email from your Gmail inbox for you or source a document hidden deep within your Drive folders. This works on smartphones, or even a desktop or laptop.

What about privacy?

Considering the whole formula that Bard Extensions works on is based on having access to your Google apps and services, including routes on Google Maps and your YouTube history, privacy can be a big concern.

However, to address this, Google in its official announcement, says that Bard Extensions will completely work without human intervention. The company also mentioned that the data pulled from these extensions will also not be used to show you ads or to train the Bard model.

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That said, the privacy conscious can always choose to only use Bard Extensions with select Google apps and not all of them, or simply refrain from using the service. Still in its nascent stages, Bard may not be the most accurate when reacting to specific queries, but these should get better with time. So, while you wait for the privacy aspect to get better, you’re also waiting for Bard Extensions to get smarter.

How to use Bard Extensions

If you’ve considered all the pros and cons, and want to go ahead with this, here’s how to use Bard Extensions. Start by setting up Bard with your Google Account. Once you reach the Bard main page, you should see options to connect Google Maps, YouTube, Google Workspace, Google Flights, and other services pop up.

If you don’t, you can manually go to ‘https://bard.google.com/extensions’ to get to the extensions page. Here you can enable or disable the extensions you want or don’t want.

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Once this is done, simply open up a new chat and you can now ask Bard to fetch emails from a particular sender, documents from a particular date. If you ask for a prompt that needs access to more extensions, Bard will alert you of the same. That’s it. You can now use Bard to do your bidding with Google apps-related tasks.