Google Brings Generative AI to Search in India
Google on Thursday announced expanding its generative AI search experience in India, the second country outside the US after Japan.
The move comes as the company seeks to re-imagine its core search engine business in the face of renewed competition from rivals such as Microsoft.
Called the Search Generative Experience (SGE), the feature will be available as an opt-in experiment through the company’s new Search Labs initiative, which will house all its early-stage experiments in Google Search.
In India, the AI-powered experience will be available in English and Hindi through Chrome desktop and the latest version of the Google App on Android and iOS.
Users can simply tap the Labs icon in the top left corner of the Google app or Chrome desktop to try out this feature.
Google early this week launched this service in Japan, which was first introduced in the US in May 2023.
Users who opt-in to the experiment will start seeing a new integrated search results page that will start appearing with an AI-generated snapshot on top of search results. This snapshot will display a quick topic summary and links to go deeper into the topic.
They can also ask a follow-up question or choose one of the suggested questions to enter a new conversational mode.
The search giant is also introducing a slew of India-focused features within the AI search experience.
Keeping in mind the high adoption of voice search in India, users can tap the ‘Listen’ button to hear the response through Text-To-Speech.
Soon, they will be able to tap the microphone icon in conversational mode to ask follow-up questions instead of typing them.
Over the past year, Google has also made concerted efforts to make its traditional search experience more visual and interactive for users by combining images, sounds, text, and speech to help them find what they’re looking for.
