Commentary: Google’s AI feature in Search answers your dumbest questions, shame-free. But maybe it wouldn’t be needed if Search was better.
You can now get answers to all the dumb questions you’re too embarrassed to ask another person or struggle to phrase in traditional Google search.
The Google I/O keynote this week was a two-hour advertisement for all the ways AI will augment and infiltrate many of the company’s biggest software and apps. There were demonstrations showing how existing AI features will get supercharged by Gemini, Google’s flagship generative AI-powered chatbot. But one of the more impressive examples was how it can empower Search to answer your questions asked while taking a video.
This is the AI future my shame-fearing self wants when I don’t know a seemingly obvious car part or whether I should get a rash checked out by a doctor.
On the other hand, I can’t ignore that the helpfulness is amplified by how much Google Search’s quality has nosedived over the last few years. The company has effectively invented a band-aid for a problem that it has continued to make worse.
On the Google I/O stage, VP of product on Google Search Rose Yao walked viewers through how they can do this. She used Google Lens to troubleshoot a malfunctioning record player, recording a video while carefully asking aloud, “Why will this not stay in place?”
Without naming the offending part — the tone arm, which carries the needle over the record — Yao forced Lens to use context clues and suggest answers. Search gave an AI summary of what it estimated the issue to be (balancing the tonearm), gave suggestions for a fix, identified the record player’s make and model, and spotlighted the source of the information so she could look for further answers.
Yao explained that this process was made possible by a series of AI queries strung together into a seamless procedure. Natural language processing parsed her spoken request, then the video was broken down frame by frame by Gemini’s context window to identify the record player and track the motion of the offending part. Search then looked through online forums, articles and videos to find the best match for Yao’s video query (in this case, an article from audiophile manufacturer Audio-Technica).
Currently, you can do all these things separately and arrive, more or less, at the same answer… eventually.
