Google’s AI Mode can now see and search with images
1 min read
Summary
Google is expanding access to AI Mode to millions of users after upgrading its chatbot with multimodal capabilities.
The new update combines a custom version of Gemini AI with its Lens image recognition technology, allowing users to both take and upload images in search of more detailed and comprehensive responses.
While the new feature is being rolled out initially to Google One AI Premium subscribers in the US, the tech giant has plans to make it available to a broader audience at a later stage.
AI Mode was designed to compete with AI chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT that use AI-generated summaries from search indices to generate responses to user queries.
The new multimodal capabilities enable the AI to understand the entire context surrounding objects in an image, including the relationship between objects, as well as colours, shapes and materials.