Google Leverages AI To Search By Filming Video

Your dishwasher has stopped working and the lights are flashing. It’s a huge ask to specify the following details as keywords into a typical Google search to troubleshoot the problem. After all, you’d have to identify the dishwasher model, describe which buttons are flashing, what colour are the blinking lights, what duration are they blinking for, is there any sound accompanying the blinking lights, etc.

Now, Google has made the process infinitely easier. It has released a new feature which will allow people to search the internet by taking a video and then overlaying it with a question that you simply speak into the phone (in the above example, take a video of the lights blinking on the dishwasher and speak a question aloud into the phone – ‘Why is the dishwasher not working?’ – and the AI will kick in to identify the dishwasher, and troubleshoot the problem for you).

Android and iPhone users globally have gained access to the feature by enabling “AI Overviews” in their Google app, but as of now it will only support English prompts.

Google introduced AI-generated results at the top of certain search queries this year.

Subsequently, as part of the integration of AI into its search engine, it offered the ability to ask questions about still images using Google Lens. That feature has now expanded from still images to video.

Industry analyst Paolo Pescatore outlined the significance of this latest move by Google to BBC and said, “Here lies the scope for AI to be truly collaborative and an innovator in everyday life – we are on the brink of AI becoming personalised and unique based upon our usage patterns and habits. This latest development further demonstrates new ways of bringing content to life with something like search which is one of the most common tasks carried out on the internet.”

Apart from making video searchable, Google has also released other updates. It says it has improved its shopping results, which will now incorporate reviews and pricing information from different sellers.

It is even introducing a competitor to the music-identifying app Shazam, which is owned by Apple.
Accessible through Circle to Search on an Android device, it will identify songs from a website a user is on or a show they’re streaming without leaving the app.

Google is already believed to control more than 90 per cent of the search market globally. Although OpenAI has opened its SearchGPT AI-powered search engine to a limited number of users in the US, Google’s dominance in the search space places it far ahead of any of its competitors.