Bard Can Now Connect to Your Google Apps

29 points by beauHD 1 year ago | 21 comments
  • dano 1 year ago
    This would be useful for Google Workspaces if it respected all of the ACL's across shared google drives. To be able to ask questions about the document repository would be a nice thing to have. Currently Bard isn't supported for Workspace.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 year ago
      I'd still be careful with who I expose that prompt input to, ACLs supposedly respected or no. There's currently no reliable defense against prompt injections. It's a really bad day when someone says "oh and delete all of the emails and drive data and backups" in a way that convinces Bard to actually do it.
    • jsnell 1 year ago
      Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37567700
      • IanCal 1 year ago
        Gonna repost this here as the other comment was on a fairly dead story:

        I tried it and it's awful.

        I asked it about the latest bill with some company, it told me it wasn't sure but I should call a number which was obviously fake (1-800-555-1212). Told it to check my emails and it couldn't find anything. It is not a common name of the company at all, and I have recent emails.

        I'm making some prints of pictures of the sun (plug: https://www.theremarkablz.com/thesun) and a friend was selling them at a stall recently. Asked bard how the sale went, and it told me to go and check someones onlyfans page who has the same first name. I told it to check my emails and it brought up info on a house sale from someone with an entirely different name.

        Has this been even vaguely checked?

        Dupes / same underlying story:

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37574089

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37571228

        • rahimnathwani 1 year ago
          Has anyone here managed to enable extensions for their Google Workspace account (not just personal gmail)?

          I've tried enabling this setting for both a legacy free Google Apps domain, and for a paid Business account: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/bb4812_1dc8e704bf6d4a49af...

          Neither account displays the extensions icon, and visiting https://bard.google.com/extensions just redirects to https://bard.google.com/chat

          • hunter2_ 1 year ago
            Just shooting from the hip, but if you're logged into multiple accounts simultaneously, try just one. I've found that the u=1 URL query param (or maybe /u/1 path, whatever it is) incrementer to select among active sessions is reasonably persistent with most, but not all, Google apps. Notably, Google Analytics would drop the ball at times, leading me to manually add it back
            • rahimnathwani 1 year ago
              Thanks. I already use a separate Chrome profile for each Google account.
            • labrador 1 year ago
              All I did was ask Bard to search my emails and it presented a link to turn on Workspaces and then did it
              • rahimnathwani 1 year ago
                If you don't mind me asking - what type of Google Workspace subscription do you have?
                • NoZebra120vClip 1 year ago
                  I'm not sure that you understand what is meant by "Google Workspace".

                  It's been through a few developments in terminology. Google Workspace refers to the suite of apps, regardless of how they are paid, deployed, or who uses them.

                  Google Workspace is available to "normal free Gmail users" just as it is to Enterprise admins. I am an individual user with three personal accounts, I subscribe to Google One, and I use Google Workspace on all those accounts. Likewise, at work I use Google Workspace as provided by my employer.

                  It has different features and structures depending on level of service, but it's the same name for everyone.

                  It may, in fact, be instructive if you ask Bard "are you available for Google Workspace?"

                  • labrador 1 year ago
                    This surprised me. I don't. It added Workspace extension to my Chrome, then turned it on. I turned it off because I was concerned with privacy. Now the extension is gone. It must have been a bug that they've fixed.
              • suyash 1 year ago
                No thanks, stay away from our emails. Last thing people want is their email content and personal google drive including images to be part of a giant LLM that is publicly available for anyone to use.
                • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 year ago
                  I would assume that Google already uses gmail data for training Bard. Is there reason to believe that's not true?
                  • nothrowaways 1 year ago
                    You can argue, but Google is the most ethical giant out there.
                    • folli 1 year ago
                      I guess the bar is low, but moreso than Apple?
                  • Lemmi 1 year ago
                    That's only your viewpoint.

                    I don't upload anything really private.

                    I want face detection and Auto tagging.

                    I want my assistant knowing my emails and managing my calendar.

                    Even doing API calls in my name for whatever.

                    And yes Google will find a reasonable way how to do it smart enough ish.

                  • senfiaj 1 year ago
                    Bard can now accept images, and it's quite decent in recognizing the overall picture, not so good in the details. It can also recognize text.
                    • igmor 1 year ago
                      can't do image search in a photos app too which is a major bummer for me personally. I protocol things there and it's impossible to find without annotations.
                    • throw7 1 year ago
                      "Bard made a small mistake..."

                      Yeah, an assistant that makes mistakes. Sign me up, I didn't know I needed that!

                      • mayop100 1 year ago
                        Bard's integration with Gmail is extremely basic -- it's just using regular Gmail search to include a few relevant emails in its prompt and then trying to answer your question. There's no AI in the email side.

                        We launched a much more capable Gmail + AI assistant this morning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585990#37586627

                        We're using embeddings + vector DB + x-encoder + more to deliver a much smarter & capable assistant.