Google’s AI Search Tools Bring 2 New Tricks. Here’s What’s on the Horizon

Gemini comes to Google Search. At his Google I/O Keynote on Tuesday, the company showed off new search capabilities powered by its AI assistant. You’ll soon start seeing AI reviews in response to your Google searches instead of the usual search results page.

Google Search is also gaining the ability to analyze videos to answer questions based on them.

Watch this: Google offers multi-step search reasoning

10:27 a.m

AI reviews instead of search results

Google uses AI-powered search to introduce multi-step reasoning in an attempt to answer more complex questions. An example given during the keynote of a multi-part question was asking Google Search to find the best yoga or pilates studios in Boston, show you details about their introductory offerings, and calculate the walking time from Beacon Hill. Gemini can work on each part of this question at once and provide an answer within seconds with information that you can then refine.

You’ll end up talking to Gemini to find the right studio, instead of the old way of searching, where you’d break this complex question down into components and search for each one individually. In particular, Google’s AI reviews will keep you on the Google search page instead of quickly linking you to third-party websites from the search results page.

Gemini will also make Google Search better at scheduling, Google said. He gave the example of meal planning, where Google Search allows you to specify your tastes and preferences to get a meal plan with recipes and a shopping list. And if one part of the plan isn’t right, you can just ask Google Search to change it until it’s something you want to do and eat.

Gemini will create the plan for you, instead of you having to deal with searching for each recipe and then putting the plan together yourself.

Video search

In addition to the text box in Google Search, you’ll soon be able to use a video to ask a question. Gemini’s multimodal understanding allows it to analyze live video and provide answers to a question about it. Examples given in this new video quest were how to fix a broken turntable arm or a stuck camera lever. Both are cases where you want to fix something, but you may not know the make or model of the player or camera or the specific name of the part that isn’t working.

Gemini-powered search has been a feature in Labs for some time, and will begin rolling out to US users starting today and over the next few weeks. It will soon expand to other countries.

Editor’s note: CNET used an AI engine to help create a handful of stories. Reviews of AI products like this, just like Other CNET hands-on reviews, are written by our human team of in-house experts. For more see CNET’s AI policy and how we test AI.