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Google’s AI Mode goes live in Australia

Whether you like Google’s AI overviews or not, searching is about to become a whole lot more AI-infused, as Australia becomes one of the last places to get the AI Mode.

AI appears poised to change the world, or at the very least change how you search, and that’s just the way it is, it seems. For Google, that started with AI Overviews sitting in search, providing an AI analysis of a combination of sites, and not always getting it right, before rolling out more AI into its Pixel phones.

The results have been a little hit and miss: people are using AI more regularly in their lives, but the AI features Google built into this year’s Pixel 10 range haven’t exactly excited reviewers, this one included. They may not even deliver useful information, or work at the best of times.

However, a few bugs can’t stop AI’s progress, with Google rolling out its AI Mode feature to search in Australia this week, a little later than much of the rest of the world back in September.

We speculated what might be the cause of the delay back then, though Google Australia appears ready now, switching on AI Mode locally this week.

As far as how AI Mode works, the system combines search with AI by allowing you to get a little more than the AI Overviews Google has shown previously. That means you can ask it complex questions and have different parts of an AI system do a search, or you can look into what’s called “multimodality”, which basically just means to use a combination of mediums to search.

Text search — where we write in our search query — is one of them, as is the act of speaking (voice) and using images, either from your camera or from the rest of the web. To be multimodal means to use multiple types of these at once, so instead of simply typing a search, you can say something, refine it with text, and then refine it further with an image, such as how you could ask what’s going on in a photo.

It also means your searches can become more complex, starting with a long question, and having the AI interpret it to bring up the answer, only to continue with more questions.

AI Mode is essentially Google’s beginning of “agentic search”, an idea that has the search engine act on your behalf as an agent. While clearly in its infancy, it’s an idea that will only grow in time.

For searchers, AI Mode could make searching a little easier, though it’s also entirely possible the AI will get it wrong. In the past year or so, AI overviews have shown Google can get it wrong, a problem that may still occur depending on what you ask it.

With AI mode switched on as part of the Google Search experience in Australia, the addition will gradually roll out over the Google app and browsers in the coming weeks. We’ve not seen it on most of our test devices, but with this announcement should be found locally soon enough.

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