ChatGPT, the chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, is nearly a year old and is still attracting well over 100 million users a month. It’s no flash in the pan. I use the chatbot every day as an alternative to endless Google searches. It’s an informative, often entertaining tool, though I don’t rely on it for factual information – it makes too many mistakes.
But the real game changer is when ChatGPT’s ability to summarise complex information is applied not to the internet at large, but to your email inbox and the digital content you’ve collected over two decades of living your life online.
Remember that complex family trust document you had your lawyer draw up a decade ago? Wouldn’t it be great to get an instant two paragraph summary of its key points to refresh your mind before you sit down with the family to discuss restructuring it?
If the promise of a genuinely intelligent digital assistant is to be realised, it will need to have access to all our personal stuff, a prospect that may leave you cold given what Big Tech has done with our data so far.
Google last week began linking its own free AI chatbot, Bard, to its popular services Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, and Google Maps. I have nearly three terabytes of data in my Google Drive for one key reason – the search function is much better than anything on offer from the likes of Microsoft and Dropbox. I can enter keywords to quickly find what I need. Bard integration supercharges that.
In the Bard interface, I can simply add the tag @Gmail or @Google Docs and then ask it to summarise the most important points of documents or emails. Within seconds, I get the summary I’ve asked for. I’ve found it to be surprisingly good.
I asked Bard to summarise the key points I’ve made in the dozens of articles I’ve written about AI this year. It came back with a bullet-pointed list of themes I’ve highlighted and concluded,
“Overall, your documents suggest that AI is a powerful tool with the potential to make a positive impact on New Zealand and the world. However, it is important to use AI responsibly and ethically.”
Not a bad summary. When it comes to email, I’ve found it great using Bard to give me a punchy summary of a collection of emails on the same topic. If you are doing research, Bard extensions into YouTube and Maps will summarise a list of relevant video links or a map with directions, which you can then embed in a document.
Google is pitching Bard as your creative partner. But what happens to the private data in your inbox and drive that it scans to serve up personalised answers? Google claims it will not use your personal information to train Bard’s public model or show you adverts, and your data will not be seen by human reviewers. You need to opt into using Bard with Gmail, Docs, and Drive and can disable it whenever you want.
In that sense, Bard integration is little different to using the search function in Gmail or Drive, which millions of people do every day.
This is the start of deeper integration of AI into the digital tools we use every day. Google has just debuted another service, Duet AI, which embeds AI content-generating tools in its productivity tools Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Gmail and takes meeting notes for you in Google Meet. Google is charging a hefty US$30 a month for the privilege. The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI chatbot will cost the same when it is widely available.
That’s a big premium. It’s aimed squarely at business users. Google and Microsoft are about to find out whether the productivity payoff is great enough to justify the price tag.
