
Google launches AI Mode in search across India
Since voice and visual searches are very popular in India, AI Mode supports questions through text, voice or images. You can simply tap the microphone icon to speak your question—ideal for long queries or when you're on the move. You can also snap or upload photos using Google Lens to ask detailed questions about what you see. For example, if you receive a new plant and want care advice, just take a photo and ask AI Mode: 'What's this plant? How do I repot it and care for it?' AI Mode will identify the plant and provide step-by-step guidance along with helpful links. You can then follow up with questions like, 'Where should I place it at home for best growth?'
Helping you explore the best of the web
AI Mode helps users find exactly what they're looking for, including the subtle details, by displaying relevant web content in various formats. This creates new opportunities to discover useful information online. The system is built on Google's quality and ranking standards and uses new techniques to improve accuracy. When AI Mode is unsure, it will show standard search results instead. As an earlystage AI product, it may not always be perfect, but Google is committed to continuous improvement. Launching AI Mode as an experiment in Labs allows Google to gather user feedback and make the experience better over time.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


India Today
16 minutes ago
- India Today
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits tech kills focus, turning off your phone is the only fix
Technology is rapidly evolving, and now it's easier than ever to reach out to people. But in all this hustle of social media and constant notifications, tech is definitely taking a toll on mental health and making it harder for people to focus. The best way to deal with this problem? According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, you can regain focus by simply turning off your phone. Yes, the same man who helped build one of the most influential tech companies and who even launched Android which is now powering billions of buzzing devices—is now saying that these very devices are impacting our ability to focus and think on the Moonshots podcast, Schmidt discussed the impact of constant digital noise, especially on young people trying to do meaningful work. 'I work with a lot of 20-somethings in research,' he said. 'One of the questions I had was, how do they do research in the presence of all these stimulations? I can answer the question definitively: they turn off their phone.'Schmidt pointed to the role of advanced tech in this rising attention crisis. 'We've essentially tried to monetise all of your waking hours,' he said. 'Ads, entertainment, subscriptions—it's all competing for your attention, and that's completely at odds with how humans are wired to think.' His comments definitely strike a chord, especially coming from someone who was once leading Google, the very company that has so many products built around capturing and keeping user attention. But Schmidt didn't shy away from the irony. 'You can't think deeply as a researcher with this thing buzzing,' he said, referring to the phone. 'Even these apps that are supposed to help you relax, just turn the phone off. That's how humans have relaxed for 70,000 years.'And this isn't the first time we have been warned about the red flags of digital distraction. Schmidt's comments echo broader growing concerns among researchers and psychologists. Dr Gloria Mark, a leading attention researcher, found in her study that the average attention span on a screen has plummeted from 2.5 minutes two decades ago to just 47 seconds today. The consequences are wide-ranging including fragmented thinking, poor retention, and increased Kwik who is known as the brain coach, author of Limitless, points out that the problem with digital distraction isn't just forgetfulness. It is the divided attention. 'They blame their retention, but it's really more their attention,' he told Forbes. 'Every ring, ping, and notification is driving us to distraction. And we wonder why we can't remember things in meetings or with our family.'A separate study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) linked digital distractions to reduced satisfaction and perceived learning. The study found that younger users, and those disengaged from live learning environments, were particularly vulnerable. Frequent behaviours like checking the time, boredom scrolling, or sending instant messages were all predictors of higher distraction Schmidt emphasises turning off the phone, he also offers a different approach of keeping the tech and focus together. He suggests that people can continue using technology, but to focus they need to strip themselves away from the distracting bits. He shared his own example where he noted how he used Google's Gemini AI to brainstorm for six hours straight during a flight and this was possible due to no interruptions, no ads, no social media. He suggests that turning off technology might not be the only solution, people can still use it effectively, as long as they keep away from the distractions.- Ends


Indian Express
16 minutes ago
- Indian Express
OpenAI's ChatGPT receives 2.5 billion prompts from users globally on daily basis
OpenAI's ChatGPT is seeing global adoption at an unprecedented rate. The Microsoft-backed startup has said that it now receives 2.5 billion prompts from users around the world every day, with more than 300 million of those prompts coming from users in the US, according to a report by Axios. This 2.5 billion figure translates to over 912 billion requests annually. It is a clear indicator of how quickly the AI chatbot is becoming a major part of daily online activity for billions of users. However, the popular AI chatbot might still trail Google in terms of engagement metrics. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, recently revealed that the search giant sees five trillion search queries from users every year. While the company does not release daily or monthly search data, the annual data means that Google Search averages 14 billion searches per day. This data has also been corroborated by a few independent researchers, according to a report by TechCrunch. Despite Google's dominance, ChatGPT has witnessed surging growth in the past year. In December 2024, OpenAI said it has over 300 million active monthly users who send one billion prompts per day. Fresh numbers shared by @sama earlier today: 300M weekly active ChatGPT users 1B user messages sent on ChatGPT every day 1.3M devs have built on OpenAI in the US — OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) December 4, 2024 The US and India are considered to be the two largest markets for ChatGPT. The chatbot app had been leading the Apple App Store charts in India but was recently dethroned from the No 1 spot by Perplexity after the latter announced free Perplexity Pro subscriptions for a year to eligible users of major Indian telecom network operator Bharti Airtel. Recently, OpenAI also unveiled ChatGPT Agent which can automate complex tasks on its own. With this addition to ChatGPT' already long list of features, it can now perform a wider array of tasks, including web browsing and creating presentations. The startup's latest AI offering has been characterised as a tool that uses its own virtual computer to complete any task on the user's behalf. The new ChatGPT Agent integrates a suite of tools, from text and visual browsers to direct API access. Crucially, it's designed to intelligently select the most appropriate tool for any given task and can even connect to external applications like GitHub and Gmail via connectors.

The Hindu
16 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Microsoft server hack impacts around 100 organisations; Stargate aims to build small data centre this year; Google and OpenAI models excel at Mathematical Olympiad
Microsoft server hack impacts around 100 organisations Microsoft has sounded an alert and released a fix after hackers exploited a vulnerability in it SharePoint software in order to target businesses and government agencies. According to researchers, about 100 organisations were impacted and these included major industrial firms, banks, auditors, healthcare companies, and multiple U.S. state-level and international government entities. The hack was a zero day exploit, which refers to a cyber-security attack that is considered serious because it exploits an unknown security vulnerability, meaning that security engineers have had 'zero days' in order to work on a fix. Other cybersecurity figures have also backed the number of affected organisations, but warned that the effects of the hack could be far-reaching and involve more serious consequences over longer time periods. The exact identity of the perpetrator is not confirmed, but Google said some of the activity could be linked to a 'China-nexus threat actor.' Stargate aims to build small data centre this year The $500 billion Stargate Project backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle that aims to accelerate America's AI infrastructure has set a more basic goal: building a small data centre by the end of the year. This will probably take place in Ohio, per The Wall Street Journal. However, the collaboration may not have been smooth sailing as the report cited sources who claimed that SoftBank and OpenAI did not agree on key partnership terms, such as where to build the sites. Project Stargate was intended to create more than 100,000 jobs in the country. Both SoftBank and OpenAI have confirmed that they were moving 'with urgency on site assessments' apart from also advancing projects in multiple U.S. states. Meanwhile, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said the first data centre was already under construction in Texas. Google and OpenAI models excel at Mathematical Olympiad Google and OpenAI both announced that their artificial-intelligence (AI) models crossed the threshold needed to score gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad for high-school students. They both solved five out of six problems and used general-purpose 'reasoning' models to work through the mathematical concepts using natural language. While the International Mathematical Olympiad has been used as a benchmark to test the mathematical abilities of AI models in the past, this marks the first time the competition coordinated officially with some AI technologists. For the competition this year, Google used a general-purpose model called Gemini Deep Think while rival OpenAI relied on a new experimental model that focused on scaling up 'test-time compute.' The new achievements unlocked by the companies come with promising potential for mathematicians as well as those from other scientific disciplines to better integrate AI models in their research process.