A brand-new generative AI chatbot for the app is called Ask Photos with Gemini.
Photos are the next target in Google’s sights as the company continues to integrate more of its Gemini artificial intelligence into a variety of its products. During today’s I/O developer conference, the CEO of the firm, Sundar Pichai, made an announcement on a new feature called Ask Photos. This tool is intended to assist you in locating specific images inside your gallery by allowing you to communicate with Gemini.
You will see that a new tab labeled “Ask Photos” will appear at the bottom of your Google Photos app. Over the next few months, it will initially be made available to customers of One, beginning with the English language in the United States. When you touch over to that panel, you will get a welcome message and the Gemini star emblem. The message will be located above a bar that asks you to “search or ask about Photos.”
According to Google, you are able to ask things like “show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited,” which not only makes use of GPS information but also needs the artificial intelligence to exercise some judgment in order to determine what one considers to be the “best.” Engadget was informed by Shimrit Ben-Yair, the Vice President of the firm for Photos, that you will have the ability to submit input to the artificial intelligence and let it know which pictures you like instead. According to Ben-Yair, “Learning is the key.”
You may also ask photographs to identify the best photographs you took on a recent trip and generate a caption to describe them. This will allow you to post these photos on social media in a more expedient manner. One more time, if you did not like what Gemini advised, you have the option to make adjustments at a later time.
You will be required to type your question into Ask Photos for the time being because voice input is not currently available. Additionally, as the functionality becomes available, those individuals who choose to make use of it will see that their current search function will be “upgraded” to Ask. Google, on the other hand, has stated that “key search functionality, such as quick access to your face groups or the map view, will not be lost.”
“Understanding your question,” “crafting a response,” and “ensuring safety and remembering corrections” are the three components that make up the Ask Photos method, according to the explanation provided by the firm. at spite of the fact that safety is only brought up at the end step, it ought to be baked in throughout the entire process. The business acknowledged the fact that “the information in your photos can be deeply personal, and we take the responsibility of protecting it very seriously.”
As a result, requests are not kept anywhere, despite the fact that they are processed in the cloud rather than on the device itself. In Ask Photos, users will not be able to see chats or personal data, with the exception of “in rare cases to address abuse or harm.” In addition, Google stated that it does not train “any generative AI product outside of Google Photos on this personal data, including other Gemini models and products.”
Your media will continue to be safeguarded by the same security and privacy safeguards that are in place for your usage of Google Photos. In light of the fact that one of the possibly more helpful methods to use Ask Photos could be to obtain information such as the expiration dates of your passport or license from photographs that you may have taken many years ago, this is a positive development. In order to locate solutions, it also makes advantage of Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to interpret text that is embedded in images.
Naturally, artificial intelligence is not a new feature in Google Photos. The company’s facial and object recognition algorithms have long allowed you to search the app for certain things, such as “credit card” or a particular acquaintance. This capability has always been available. On the other hand, Gemini AI introduces generative processing, which enables Photos to perform a great deal more than simply present photographs that contain specific individuals or objects.
Getting Photos to tell you what themes you might have chosen for the most recent birthday celebrations you hosted for your partner or child is another tool that you can employ. Gemini AI is currently being put to work in order to analyze your photographs and determine the themes that you have previously adopted.
Ask Photos is now an experimental feature that is “starting to roll out soon.” There are a lot of use cases that show promise for the tool, and it also has a lot of potential applications. It is possible that, similar to previous tools for Photos, it will initially be a premium feature for One members and Pixel owners, and then it will gradually become available to all users of the free app. There has been no formal announcement made regarding when or whether that might take place as of yet.