Google said on Thursday it is now testing out generative AI-powered video search in India. This feature enables users to take a video using Google Lens, and ask the company’s Gemini AI model questions about the contents of the video.
The company said that users would need to sign up for the “AI Overviews and More” experiment program in Google Seach Labs, but didn’t specify how long these videos would need to be to use the feature. Google said India is the largest user base for Google Lens on a monthly basis.
Users who participate in this experiment will be able to use this feature in Google Lens. The video search features are available to moble users and only supports queries in English at the moment.
Google announced this feature earlier this year at Google I/O for U.S.-based users in English.
Google is pushing multimodal search in India as more people are comfortable using voice or video as a communication medium. It said more than 40% of Indian users in the country prefer to talk to Gemini instead of chatting with it over text.
The company also added local language support for free-flowing conversation with Gemini Live in Hindi. Support for Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu will be added soon.
The company first introduced the ability to search by combining both photos and text in 2021 to save people from the trouble of describing objects. In 2022, Google brought the multimodal search seach feature to India.