Google Photos got a surprise upgrade at the Google I/O 2024 keynote on Tuesday. The session, moderated by CEO Sundar Pichai, witnessed several big artificial intelligence (AI) announcements, including new upgrades for Gemini 1.5 Pro, new Google search features, introduction of new AI models for images and video, and more. Interestingly, the tech giant also unveiled Ask Photos, a new AI-powered intelligent chatbot for Google Photos that makes it easy to search for a specific image in the library.
During the event, Pichai noted that the company is now creating more powerful search experiences within Google products using Gemini’s capabilities. One such example is Google Photos, which was one of the tech giant’s first platforms to get AI capabilities. Before the new updates, the AI tools in Photos could only understand basic keywords and specific topics, which could be used to find photos that users were looking for. However, with Ask Photos latest intelligent search tool, this process could become much easier.
Ask AI is powered by Gemini and is fine-tuned as a search engine. It can understand natural language instructions and can read and understand a large number of photos by subject, background and even digital information in metadata. “With Ask Photos, you can search for what you’re looking for in a natural way, like, ‘Show me the best photo from every national park I’ve visited.’ Google Photos can show you what you need, saving you all that scrolling,” the company announced in publish.
Furthermore, it can also answer questions based on that information. For example, a user can ask about the theme of an office party, and the AI will check the images and share the information. It can even tell the user the color of the shirt he was wearing that day. The tech giant claims the AI tool can even perform tasks beyond searching and answering queries. AI can also create a highlight of a recent trip by suggesting top pictures and writing personalized captions for each one in case the user wants to share it on social media.
Google also focuses on user data privacy. Since Ask Photos will be trained on users’ photo galleries, it has access to private and sensitive data. But the tech giant said the data would never be used for ads. The Company will also not review these conversations and personal information in Ask Photos unless it relates to abuse and harm. The data also won’t be used to train any AI products outside of Google Photos, the company said.
