Google announced on Thursday that its generative AI-powered version of its flagship product, Search, has been optimized for India. Starting today, the platform, which will be made accessible as a pilot to any user who voluntarily agrees to participate in the trial, will offer a chatbot-like experience in place of the traditional search bar that has traditionally been associated with search engines.
Users will be able to do searches in both Hindi and English using the India-specific version of Google‘s AI-powered Search, known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), which will also enable voice input for search queries and readouts of search results.
Nearly four months after its global premiere, SGE is making its way to India. Google’s vice-president and general manager of Search, Elizabeth Reid, announced the launch of the updated Search on May 10.
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“We’re once more reinventing what a search engine can achieve with fresh advancements in generative AI. In order to help you navigate and make sense of the information available, we can now answer queries of a completely new kind that you never imagined Search could address thanks to this potent new technology.” said Reid.
The news comes after Microsoft took the lead by launching a new version of its own search engine, Bing, powered by OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4. With the debut, Google, whose research group is credited with developing transformer models, the key technology underlying generative AI, lost ground in the generative AI competition. This announcement can be seen as Google’s attempt at catching up.
