First look: Bard ‘Extensions’ will add Google and third-party services

The next step for Google’s Bard AI will see it directly integrate with some of the company’s own services along with a collection of third-party options, and we have your first look.

Today, Bard – one of Google’s two competitors to ChatGPT – pulls information from websites that are cached by Google Search. While that can be quite helpful, there’s also a world of information online that isn’t able to be cached and needs to be up-to-date. For instance, the pricing and availability of plane tickets will vary over time.

To that end, Google has prepared a way for Bard to directly integrate with the company’s own tools – like Google Maps, Google Flights, and YouTube – as well as third-party services. At Google I/O, the company announced this feature, previewing it and revealing some of the initial partners, including Adobe.

Looking ahead, we’ll introduce new ways to fuel your imagination and curiosity by integrating the capabilities of Google apps and services you may already use — Docs, Drive, Gmail, Maps and others — right into the Bard experience. And of course, you’ll always be in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these tools and extensions.

Bard will also be able to tap into all kinds of services from across the web, with extensions from outside partners, to let you do things never before possible. In the coming months, we’ll integrate Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, into Bard so you can easily and quickly turn your own creative ideas into high-quality images, which you can then edit further or add to your designs in Adobe Express.

My colleague Dylan Roussel managed to enable an early preview of these extensions and how they’ll appear in Bard’s web app. Unfortunately, while the UI is available, the extensions themselves don’t seem to work. There may be as many as nine of these “Extensions” at launch:

• Google Flights
• Google Hotels
• Google Maps
• Instacart
• Kayak
• OpenTable
• Redfin
• YouTube
• Zillow

It’s interesting to see that there’s some overlap between the services offered. For example, Kayak overlaps with Google Flights and Google Maps, while Redfin and Zillow offer similar services to one another.

In a new Extensions menu – accessible through a puzzle-piece icon – you’ll be able to enable/disable particular services. There, you’ll also find how best to use each Bard Extension, with examples like “Find houses in Atlanta, GA under 1M$.”

In addition to the services above, we’ve also seen signs of Google preparing a (previously announced) Workspace extension for Bard, which would give the chatbot access to your Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail.

Link apps like Docs, Drive, and Gmail

Bard and Google Workspace will share data with each other to complete your requests. You can unlink them at any time in Extensions settings

These new extensions bring Bard in line with ChatGPT, which is currently previewing its own set of plugins, including options from Kayak and Instacart.

Dylan Roussel contributed to this article.