(Credit: Google)
Google is opening up AI Mode, the web-search chatbot it began testing in March, to "millions more Labs users in the US."
AI Mode is Google’s attempt to compete with other AI chatbots that have added web-search capabilities. It's also a step beyond the AI Overview search results that Google introduced last May (and which promptly began serving up wildly inaccurate results sourced from places like sarcastic Reddit posts), because AI Mode operates in a conversational mode.
For example, my query, “What is a good native groundcover to plant in shady ground in Northern Virginia?” yielded a list of plants native to the region. Following up with “Where can I buy these plants near DC?” got me a list of nurseries around here, some specializing in native plants and others that include them among their other plants for sale.
Both sets of answers linked out to sources, but checking the accuracy of those results requires an extra step. AI Mode displays a link icon at the end of each data point in its results that, when clicked, shows a preview of the source page at the top right of the page. A second click will take you to that page.
Google’s documentation specifies that you also have to be using the latest version of its Chrome browser or Google’s eponymous mobile app. But I had no problem using AI Mode in the latest version of Apple’s Safari on a Mac mini.
(There, I asked “How far can the stock market fall from Trump's tariffs,” which yielded a non-reassuring answer that correctly cited Citigroup research findings of an average 22.1% drop in the S&P 500 stock index during post-1948 recessions.)
Also today, Google announced that it’s adding AI Mode to the Lens feature of its Google app for Android and iOS, leveraging the company’s Gemini AI to discern the entirety of a scene and how things in it relate to each other.
A video provided by Google PR shows a user pointing their phone at a set of books on a bookshelf that offer advice on living and thinking better, asking for reading recommendations along those lines and then asking for titles that would be a faster read. AI Mode’s pick was Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, which from that subtitle alone seems like a timely read in this economy.