Google Brings Multimodal AI Mode Search to Google Lens, Expanding to More Users

Google announced that it is expanding its recently released AI Mode feature to more apps and users on Monday. The feature is now available in Google Lens and comes with multimodal capability. The company also said that the free subscribers of Google Labs will also get access to it. The Mountain View-based tech giant introduced the artificial intelligence (AI) tool in early March as an experiment. It is an expansion to the existing AI Overviews, and offers responses on complex topics, multi-faceted search queries, and search topics that would normally take a user multiple searches to find the information.

Google Lens Will Now Show AI Mode Search Results

In a blog post, Google announced the expansion of AI Mode. The tech giant said that it has received positive feedback about the feature from users, especially regarding its response time and detailed nature of responses. Notably, so far, the feature was only available to those US-based Google Labs users who had an active Google One AI Premium subscription.

Now, the company has said that the AI Mode will be made “available to millions more Labs users in the US,” as well as those who sign up now in Labs. Both Android and iOS users of the Google app can access the feature. While still not available outside of the US, it is expected that Google will expand the feature to more regions in the future.

The AI Mode is also being added to Google Lens. The feature will support multimodal input, and when a user clicks an image or uploads one from their camera roll along with a query, the AI feature will share a comprehensive response along with related links to learn more about the topic. The company said the AI Mode in Lens is powered by a custom version of the Gemini model.

AI Mode feature in Google Lens
Photo Credit: Google

The post also shared an example of the feature where a user snaps an image of books on a shelf, requesting for recommendation. The Gemini-powered AI Mode was able to identify each book in the image and ran separate searches to learn about them and about books similar to them.

After running these queries in the background, it came up with book recommendations, along with links that the user can click to learn more about the individual books. Users can also ask follow-up queries in the same interface to narrow down their choices.