While the OpenAI’s Board vs. CEO drama unfolded in front of the world, Google Bard silently kept getting better and better with several helpful updates. The latest of those helpful feature upgrades came in its YouTube extension that allows Bard to comprehend YouTube videos and their context.

With this new capability, Google Bard can watch the video on your behalf and answer complex questions from that video. Users can now ask Bard directly about the video or what happened in the video without having to open it.

Searched for a recipe?

Bard answered with some videos.

You don’t have to watch the whole video. Just ask Bard to summarize the video. Or better yet, ask Bard what you need to know exactly, like how many eggs are in this recipe, how much flour you should use, or what temperature you should set your oven to. Google Bard will watch the video and answer it for you.

Found a Russian HAM operator’s video when you were looking for a niche tutorial on how to set up your radio equipment or calculate antenna gain or what frequency your radio can pick up?

Well, you don’t need to know Russian to understand the video. Just ask Bard; it will assimilate information from the video, translate the acquired knowledge into English, and serve you as bite-sized facts.

This advanced feature of Bard will not only save millions of work hours every day but also make troubleshooting and learning much faster through YouTube.

Besides understanding YouTube video content, Bard also understands and can solve math problems.

Stuck with a problem?

Simply take a photo of the mathematical equation and upload it to Bard. Not only will Bard solve the problem for you, but it will also offer you a comprehensive step-by-step explanation of its solution.

This will allow students to solve and practice math problems much faster than trying to solve them by learning from a decade-old YouTube video.

On top of that, Bard now also understands data and can present it visually as charts or graphs. This will facilitate data-driven work of any scale. Simply give it raw data like class test scores, and Bard will visually present insights that were otherwise not obvious in its raw form.

Google Lens’ capabilities are also baked into Bard, which means it can now read, comprehend, or encapsulate the message conveyed in an image. It can also extract data from images, allowing it to read a graph for you and present the visual data in a table format that can be extracted into Google Sheets. This will render rudimentary data entry tasks obsolete and increase productivity for companies and individuals of any scope and scale.

Using the Workspace extension, Bard can also summarise several emails simultaneously. This is particularly helpful when you don’t have time to skim a long email thread to find a piece of simple information. Bard can just read the emails for you and summarize the conversation or answer your questions based on the contents of the email.

If you don’t want to read the summarised notes, you can always ask Bard to read it in one of 40 languages, including English, Spanish, and Hindi, thanks to its text-to-speech capabilities.

Comparing Google Bard against Open AI’s ChatGPT makes it clear that Google has an unfair advantage in this race. Even though ChatGPT has Dall-E’s image-generative AI included with it, it cannot access videos from YouTube yet. For Bard, it is not an issue since Bard, a product of Google, has direct and unrestricted access to YouTube, another product from Google.

Also, Google is going to be leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to Text-to-Speech. They’ve been working on text-to-speech with Google Translate even before OpenAI, as a company, broke its ground stone.

Besides, while people have to pay for the advanced features of OpenAI, Google Bard and all of its features are completely free, and these helpful features are being pushed all over the Google space, including Google Search, where almost 1,00,000 queries are made every second. This way, Google is making sure people are getting used to Bard even when they are not looking for it.

Slowly but surely, while Microsoft and OpenAI struggle with the internal drama with the board and the employees, Google is becoming the go-to default AI for the masses.

Author: Rifat Ahmed