Google’s AI-powered article summaries will first be available for iOS and Android before they come to Chrome on desktop.
The new Google Search Experience (SGE) feature presents a new and significant feature: it will be able to summarize articles you read on the internet, based on a post on Google’s blog. SGE can already summarize search results so you don’t have to scroll endlessly to find what you’re looking for.
Google says the new feature, starting to appear on Tuesday, 15/8 as a “early experiment” in its Opt-in Search Labs program. (You will get access to it if you have already joined SGE, but if not, you can join by yourself.) It will be available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company will bring it to the Chrome browser on desktop “in the coming days”.
If you have access to the Google mobile app, Google will bring up the article’s “key points” after you click on an icon at the bottom of the screen. The feature is designed to work “only on articles freely available to the public on the internet”; Google says it won’t work with sites that publish paid content.
Google is also making other improvements to SGE. In search results for topics like science, economics, and history, Google says you will be able to click on specific words to get definitions or diagrams on the subject.
Google announced SGE at Google I/O in May and has been improving it in the months since. In the company’s latest earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that user feedback “has been very positive so far” and that “over time, this will simply be how search works”.
