Google Bard gets a major upgrade today. Conveniently timed just before Microsoft's big September event, we will hear about the new features of rival chatbot Bing, which uses ChatGPT.

The most notable new feature is Bard Extensions, a new upgrade to the English-language version of Google Bard that allows AI-powered chatbots to direct tasks involving other Google apps and services like Gmail and Outlook.

Bard is also getting what could be a better fact-checking tool in the form of an enhanced "Google it" button that attempts to double-check answers using Google Search.

Chatbots have also become more useful in a collaborative sense (more on that later) and more accessible. While the new Bard Extensions are only available in the English version of Bard, the company has updated Bard in over 40 other supported languages, including a major upgrade in July that includes some of the latest features in the English version.

This is an important enhancement for this nascent chatbot, which came a bit late to Bing in the ChatGPT vs. Google Bard debate. While it will take a little while for the truly geeky to see what the new extension does, here are three big things that Google Bard has done better with today's upgrade.

The biggest new feature is Bard Extensions, which lets you instruct a chatbot to answer questions using data from other Google apps: Google Docs and Drive, as well as Google Flights, Hotels, and YouTube services, and can use multiple services at the same time in the same conversation.

If you're using more than one or two Google services, you'll quickly see how it can impact the way you do everything from planning presentations to dinner dates to company offsites.

Bard is also getting what could be a better fact-checking tool in the form of an enhanced "Google it" button that uses Google search to double-check answers and find supporting evidence.

Once Google's technology determines that such evidence exists, users will be able to click on the highlighted text to "learn more about corroborating or contradicting information found in a search" online. Given that many AIs are inaccurate, this may prove to be a useful reality check.

Finally, Google Bard has made it a bit easier to share with friends: if you share a link to a Google Bard conversation (there's a button for that under every response Bard returns), the recipient can continue the conversation themselves.

So it's not like two people typing responses to Bard in the same shared conversation - that pleasure is only for those who dare to huddle around the same screen and type silly answers into the machine - but a better way to collaborate in a Bard chat It should be. For example, you could send your friends links to restaurants that Bard recommends and see if they want to go. The possibilities for co-creation, planning, and tomfoolery are mind-boggling.

Taken together, these new features add substantial new functionality to Google Bard and provide many new ways to ask Google's chatbots for help. How they will be used and how useful Bard will be remains to be seen.

But what is really noteworthy here is that Google is trying to keep pace with its competitor Microsoft and integrate AI-powered chatbots into its own suite of apps and services.

Microsoft has already laid out plans to effectively integrate its services (Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, etc.) with Microsoft 365 Copilot's AI-powered assistant, and Windows 11 Copilot will They are experimenting with integrating chatbots directly into Windows.

Will Google take the next step of integrating Bard directly into ChromeOS, so that other Google services can talk to you with AI-powered answers, like the Google Assistant on the Google Pixel Tablet? It could be. The thought of that boggles the mind.