Google Authenticator's Material You redesign finally goes global Key Takeaways Google's AI Overviews in Search could soon allow users to select a portion of the text for further AI-generated information. Users will only be able to get one AI-generated response with this new feature, at least for now. Evidence of this upcoming feature was spotted within a beta of the Google app for Android. ✕ Remove Ads
It's pretty clear at this point that AI Overviews in Google Search won't be going away anytime soon. This generative AI experience has been around for a few months and is currently available in more than 100 countries. Despite all the negative press revolving around the inaccurate and sometimes dangerous results generated by AI Overviews, they have since improved to a great extent. Now that things appear to have settled down, Google is looking to expand its functionality further, specifically by letting users select a portion of the AI-generated overview to get additional information, also with the help of AI.
Related Google Shopping gets its own version of AI Overviews for your product searches
And a new logo to along with it
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Screenshots shared with Android Authority contributor AssembleDebug by Telegram user Eli_Blau show how AI Overviews would let users get a follow-up AI response by selecting a portion of the text. To put it in simple terms, this is effectively an AI Overview of an AI Overview.
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The follow-up result appears on the bottom half of the screen, and it's resizable, too, enabling users to go through both the original AI Overview and the newly generated result at the same time. This feature appears to be part of a limited experiment, with Eli_Blau reportedly spotting it in version 15.45.33 (beta) of the Google app.
✕ Remove Ads There are some limitations in place
Based on this revelation, AI Overviews will only let you generate one additional response in this fashion, which is understandable. However, we wouldn't be surprised if Google decided to let users go even further down the AI Overviews hole in a future update. Meanwhile, you can only trigger this follow-up response by selecting text from within the AI Overview window, so selecting any text or sentence from outside this box won't initiate the response.
We can anticipate a situation where this could be annoying, particularly if you just want to copy the selected text and not get another AI-generated result. From the video above, it looks like the follow-up response is automatically generated as soon as you select a portion of the text within the AI Overview window.
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Google appears to have put quite a bit of thought into this, suggesting that it may be one of those features that will eventually roll out more broadly. But we can't say when, given that it's still not available on devices running the latest beta of the Google app, including mine.