Bard gets major upgrade as a personal assistant
If you want to trust your personal data to Bard, it can now act as a personal assistant checking through emails, setting calendar events, and generally doing some heavy lifting for you of herding cats.
TL;DR – started as an exploration into the new tools and imediately becomes an Ai hallicination event.
A new double check option has also been included to check some of Bard’s work and ensure that the place you’re booked for actually exists and isn’t an AI hallucinating.
You can also have Bard look at historical data by connecting Google Workspace to help you out if you’ve been traveling and need to know things like what hotels you stayed at and how much they cost.
Find out what other people thought
And then discover that Bard has pulled ratings out of thin air as Rushmore Express is 3.8 on yelp and an 8.6 on Expedia, Research Park Inn is not listed as such on yelp and 5.8 on Expedia… etc..
One of the things they touted in their Septerber update was the option to double-check Bard’s results in more places… this however is not one of them as there’s no information where it pulled this data.
I asked it to compose a song based on my July 2023 trip and it really went heavy on the one part of the trip we actually missed (the Corn Palace.) There were no emails indicating we missed it, so whatever, it did what it could based on what information it had.
The ability to search your email is amazing, but a check your work option needs to exist any time it’s taking the time to pull things from the internet for you.
Tapping into Google Maps you would think it would have access to my historical data, but when I ask it about anything it says it doesn’t have access to location history. I wonder what info from Google Maps it has that I am granting it then.
It’s a very large step, but the first five things I asked it to do somehow failed.
The sixth thing I asked was a little trickier – how many emails has my wife sent me. It said it couldn’t find any and in the same result returned five emails – two from my wife, one that mentions her, an email from Mint Mobile (no clue,) and a Disqus comment where the commenter mentions his wife got on a plan. OK, Got it it’s searching for “wife”
I tell it her name and it says she has sent me five emails… it returns five emails from March 8, 2023 to Jun 1, 2020. I check my gmail and count 7 just in the past month. OK, so it’s not particularly good at counting either.
Eh, it’s moving forward… I suspect it will arrive with double checking options soon, something they’ve touted they just released version 2 of, but does not seem to work well… like why is it claiming five emails… no link to why it didn’t considered the seven in my inbox the last month to be emails from her.
I ask Bard what’s her email address, it returns it correctly. I ask how many emails has <heremailaddress> sent, it says 5, I go to gmail and look at that email address in the search bar and I get 1-50 of Many returned and options to go page to page for more.
Bard is doing interesting things, but if I can throw it for a loop on all my attempts to get real data, and I I stress am not attempting to fool it I’m actively hoping it will win, it’s still real bad and needs fixing.
I mean seriously, every single simple task I attempt it’s doing it wrong.
But then once again when I’m feeling pretty down about AI I ask it to do something like write a song baded on directions from Nashville, TN to Portland, Or with stops at EV chargers along the way, and it did… I don’t think it’ll chart, but it combined with Google Maps to produce something pretty useful.
As I was closing this out I did the following prompts, and it got useful again:
Imagine I have an EV with a range of about 220 miles. Plan me a trip with stops at charging stations approximately every 200 miles between Nashville, TN and New York, NY. Assuming the "Tank" is 73kWh please figure out the general cost of the trip as well. List all ev stops, expected times to charge, and costRoute plotted, cost assessed, and assuming it’s right I Have a list of stops and assumed costs. The charging times it failed on universally but it was consistant there thinking everything was 30 minutes. I did not verify that all the charging stations exist, but would in the event I 1) had an ev and 2) were heading out on a trip.
I asked this follow up
now cross reference that with my contacts and email to see if I know anyone in the areas I will be stopping to chargeThis produced two people I’d never heard of out of the air and placed them in Knoxville, still attempting to figure out who they are. I’m not entirely sure who any of these people are now that I’m looking at it but it either hallucinated them into existence or they’re people who have contacted me via marketing agencies and now Google thinks I know them…
Interesting…
Needs work, would not trust it to complete a task yet without double and triple checking its work.
