Google Photos merges classic search with AI to speed up results
After Google temporarily paused the rollout of its buggy AI-powered 'Ask Photos' feature in Google Photos, the company announced that it has improved the feature's ability to quickly return search results.
The AI feature, first introduced at Google's I/O developer conference last year, allows users to search across their collection of digital photos using natural language queries. Leveraging Google's Gemini, Ask Photos taps into the AI's ability to understand a photo's content and its other metadata when responding to input.
However, users complained the AI feature wasn't reliable and was often slow to respond while the AI was 'thinking.'
Addressing these concerns, Google Photos product manager Jamie Aspinall wrote on X earlier in June that 'Ask Photos isn't where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and ux,' and noted the rollout would be paused for a couple of weeks while Google worked to bring back the 'speed and recall of the original search.'
Screenshot
In a short blog post published on Thursday, Google says it's bringing the best of Photos' classic search feature into Ask Photos, particularly for simple searches like 'beach' or 'dogs.' This allows the search results to display more quickly, as classic search did before.
The AI, in the meantime, will work in the background to find the most relevant photos and work to answer more complex queries.
For instance, if you search for a photo of a 'white dog,' a series of initial search results immediately appear. After the AI finishes its analysis, its results will appear below, along with some introductory text that may identify your dog by name, if you've added it, and tell you when photos of the animal first appeared.
The interface still allows you to switch to classic search if you prefer.
As a result of these changes, Google has now resumed the rollout of Ask Photos to more people across the U.S.
To be eligible to use Ask Photos, you must be 18 or older, and your account language must be set to English. You must also enable Face Groups, the feature that labels the people and pets found in the Google Photos library.
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