Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O) disclosed it was expanding its AI-generated summaries on Thursday for search queries to six new countries, just two (2) months after it rolled back some capabilities following a launch riddled with problems.
According to reuters.com:
The search giant made AI Overviews – which are displayed atop a search results page before traditional links to the Web – available to all U.S. users in May after spending one year trialing a limited earlier version.The feature was widely panned after screenshots of factually inaccurate answers circulated across the internet, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and an answer wrongly stating that former U.S. President Barack Obama is Muslim.
AI Overviews is now coming to the Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Britain, in local languages such as Portuguese and Hindi.
The “odd and erroneous overviews” were acknowledged by Google and it announced updates via a blog post in late May.
A senior director of product at Google, Hema Budaraju, told Reuters, “I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving.”
She pointed to data Google collects internally, which revealed that users with access to the feature reported higher levels of satisfaction, as well as searched for longer, more particular queries than users who did not.
