Today, Google has announced the rollout of Gemini 2.0 inside of AI Overviews, which brings along a new experimental feature for Google Search that the company is calling AI Mode. AI Mode takes what AI Overviews already does and makes them even more powerful than before.
AI Mode expands what AI Overviews can do with “more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions,” Google says. The new experimental mode is exclusive to Google One AI Premium subscribers right now. However, Google does plan to make this available to anyone at some point. The company doesn’t mention specifically when that will be, though.
For the moment, you’ll need to be subscribed to the Google One AI Premium service. That service costs $19.99 a month. Obviously, Google is gearing this toward users who already engage with AI Overviews a lot and want more of this kind of information. Google says that its power users have said they want more AI responses in their searches. AI Mode aims to give them those responses.
AI Mode in Google Search allows you to ask follow-up questions
Here’s how AI Mode works. You open up Google Search, and just like with any other search query, you type in your question and hit search. Once you get your results, you can tap the new AI Mode tab that sits next to all the other tabs like All, Images, News, and more.
You’ll then be given an AI-powered response, just like in AI Overviews, but with seemingly more details. This is where the magic of AI Mode comes in. Down at the bottom of the AI Mode results, you’ll see another search bar that says “Ask AI Mode.” Tap on that bar and put in a follow-up question to get more information related to your initial query. If you have more follow-up questions, you can repeat this process to get even more details, and AI Mode will just keep serving those details up to you.
Google says the information comes together using what it calls a query fan-out technique. “It uses a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide an easy-to-understand response,” Google says.
According to Google, this works better than a traditional Google Search because you get more depth and breadth of information. These responses also draw information from multiple sources at the same time. So, you get a more complete response with the details you were looking for.
You can use voice and images to get your responses
If you don’t feel like typing everything, AI Mode lets you interact in other ways. You can also tap the mic button and speak your follow-up questions. Additionally, the mode lets you upload images to get responses as well. That being said, doing this on mobile will only give you text responses. Though, it seems the plan is to eventually incorporate voice responses as well.
To keep things neatly wrapped up, all of your searches are kept in a thread so you can go back and look at them as well. As mentioned, this feature is only available to Premium subscribers right now. However, you can join a waiting list if you’re interested in checking this out. When it becomes available generally, Google will send out notifications (likely via email) telling people they can use it.
