Google quietly paused the rollout of its AI-powered ‘Ask Photos’ search feature

Google is pausing the rollout of its AI-powered “Ask Photos” diagnostic wrong Google Photos, which has been dilatory expanding since past fall. “Ask Photos isn’t wherever it needs to be,” wrote Jamie Aspinall, a merchandise manager for Google Photos, successful a post connected X responding to criticism, citing 3 factors: latency, quality, and idiosyncratic experience. 

The experimental diagnostic is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini AI models. Specifically, it’s a specialized mentation of its Gemini models that are “only utilized for Ask Photos,” according to Google. 

Aspinall said Google had paused the feature’s rollout “at precise tiny numbers portion we code these issues,” and that successful astir 2 weeks, the squad would vessel a amended mentation “that brings backmost the velocity and callback of the archetypal search.

At the aforesaid time, Google also announced Tuesday that keyword hunt successful Photos is getting better, allowing you to usage quotes to find nonstop substance matches wrong “filenames, camera models, captions, oregon substance wrong photos,” oregon hunt without quotes to see ocular matches too.

Google announced the feature past May astatine I/O 2024, and positioned it arsenic a mode to query your Photos app for common-sense questions that different quality would typically person to assistance with — i.e., asking astir which themes you’ve chosen successful the past for a child’s day party, oregon which nationalist parks you’ve visited. 

“Gemini’s multimodal capabilities tin assistance recognize precisely what’s happening successful each photograph and tin adjacent work substance successful the representation if required,” the institution wrote successful the announcement. “Ask Photos past crafts a adjuvant effect and picks which photos and videos to return.”

It’s not the archetypal clip Google has paused the rollout of an AI-powered feature, arsenic it competes successful a rapidly intensifying AI arms contention against different tech giants and startups alike. 

Last May, wrong weeks of debuting “AI Overview” successful Google Search, Google paused the diagnostic aft nonsensical and inaccurate answers went viral connected societal media, with nary mode to opt retired of usage. Two high-profile examples: The diagnostic called Barack Obama the archetypal Muslim president of the United States, and recommended users put glue connected pizza to support the food on. 

And past February, Google rolled retired Gemini’s image-generation instrumentality with a bully woody of fanfare, past paused the diagnostic that aforesaid month aft users reported humanities inaccuracies, specified arsenic an AI-generated representation depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers arsenic radical of color.