Google has added more functionality to the AI Mode feature it introduced for Google Search earlier this year. The search giant has improved AI Mode with new multimodal understanding, allowing the feature to handle more data types.
You can click a photo or upload an image and ask questions about it to get comprehensive answers with links to explore further. Google explained in a blog post that the new visual search capabilities allow AI Mode to "understand the entire scene in an image, including the context of how objects relate to one another and their unique materials, colors, shapes and arrangements."
AI Mode was introduced last month as an early experiment in Search Labs. Google One AI Premium users were the first to try out the feature. Now, Google is expanding the feature to millions of Labs users in the US.
The feature is based on a custom version of Gemini 2.0, which is helpful for questions that need further exploration, comparisons, and reasoning. You can ask multi-part questions and follow-up questions to learn more.
It's worth noting that the AI Mode works similarly to the AI Overviews feature. While both features use generative AI to answer queries, Google's AI Overviews feature is designed to offer a quick AI-generated summary. Meanwhile, AI Mode helps explore queries in a better way and offers a more conversational experience.
AI Mode exists on Google Search as a new tab alongside All, News, Images, Videos, and more. It uses a "query fan-out" technique to perform multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and various data sources and combines them to create a detailed response.
Google notes that, on average, AI Mode queries are twice as long as traditional search queries. People mostly use AI Mode to ask open-ended questions, compare products, plan a trip, and explore how-tos.
For instance, you can ask questions like, "What's the difference in sleep tracking features between a smart ring, smartwatch and tracking mat?" You can follow it up with something like, "What happens to your heart rate during deep sleep?”
With the new addition, you can snap a picture of your bookshelf and ask the AI mode to suggest similar recommendations. It will then try to analyze the subtleties in the image and identify each book on the shelf to provide a list of recommended books with links to learn more about them.
Eligible users can try out AI Mode and its new multimodal search experience in the Google app on Android and iOS, where it's part of the Google Lens feature.
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