Google has improved its Circle to Search feature with more powerful AI Overviews, making it stronger for Android users. The feature enables users to circle, scribble, or tap on anything they can see on their screen to search the web instantly without leaving their app. The feature now comes with new abilities to process a wider variety of visual searches, giving instant insights into objects such as trending products, competitor ads, or storefront logos.
Visual Search Insights: People can circle products in images to generate AI-powered summaries. For instance, if you spot a prominent product in a Facebook update, circling it will provide a summary of the brand, price, comparable products, and links to learn more. The feature is particularly useful for companies and marketers looking to research trends and consumer habits.
Navigational Searches: Circle to Search is now able to detect numbers, email addresses, and URLs on the screen so that people can open a URL, email someone, or dial a phone number in a single touch. It simplifies interacting with content on the screen.
AI Overviews have been added to display additional types of visual search results, including locations, trending images, and unique objects. When conducting a search by Circle to Search, the user will see an AI Overview section above regular search results. The section provides a brief summary of circled content and includes three new text-based chips:
Summary Text from Image: This feature creates a detailed AI-powered summary of the text, and includes information that is pulled from the web to support the summary.
Explain Text from Image: This feature is focused on explaining the data in the text and other things that can be seen in the image.
Extract Text from Image: This feature extracts text from the image and presents it in a bullet point format, which can be easily copied or utilized.
These new chips are part of the beta release of the Google app (v16.11.36) and are server-side rolling out, so users won’t need to update the app in order to access them. The features are meant to enhance the user experience by providing users with fast and actionable responses from visual information.
The enhancements to Circle to Search are aimed at making it easier for users to extract information from images and videos. This can be particularly useful for product research, competitor content analysis, or consumer behavior. The ability to summarize, describe, or extract text from images easily makes it easier to collect insights, allowing users to make informed decisions quicker.
These features, as they become available, should be arriving on more Android phones, including Samsung Galaxy phones. These features can be enabled with the Circle to Search feature in the latest Google app beta, or users can choose to turn off AI Overviews in settings if they don’t want them.
