Google has been dying to bring generative AI features to Google Search as soon as ChatGPT went viral more than two years ago. Its efforts started with Bard, the early ChatGPT rival from Google, and continued with Gemini. Google Search now has several AI features available to users, just as OpenAI has done the unexpected and launched its own ChatGPT Search product that’s now part of the ChatGPT experience.
However, it’s one thing to perform internet searches while you use a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini, and quite another to have genAI features in an internet search product forced on you. The former is optional, whereas Google Search AI features aren’t.
Unfortunately for Google, things haven’t been going that great from the get-go. The AI Overviews that populate Google Search results experienced massive hallucinations, the kind that tell you to put glue on pizza so the cheese sticks. Google fixed them, but they’ll still misbehave.
Then there’s AI Mode, a Google Search menu that gives you a ChatGPT or Gemini chatbot experience in Search. It’s much better than AI Overviews in my view, but it’s still limited to the US for now.
But this Wednesday, Google Search got a cool AI feature that’s actually very helpful. It’s called “Simplify,” and while it sounds like a spell from the Harry Potter movies, it’s a different type of magic, one every internet search product could use. As the name suggests, Simplify will make it easier to understand complex information on the web.
If you’ve ever used ChatGPT to dumb down explanations for more complex concepts and ideas, you’ll understand why Simplify sounds so exciting to me. One of the great things about AI chatbots is that they can help you understand anything, no matter how complex. They can simplify technical descriptions and industry-specific jargon so that anyone can understand any text.
Now that Google announced the Simplify feature for Search, I’m surprised we didn’t get it sooner, given how brilliant it is. This is where AI can come in handy, without worrying that it might hallucinate or invent facts. It’s like using AI to translate foreign languages, but this time, you’re translating concepts that are difficult to grasp.
Even better, you can make things easier to understand without leaving the page you’re on:
Simplify, a new feature in the Google app on iOS, uses AI to make dense text on the web easier to understand — without leaving a web page.
Unfortunately, this Google Search feature isn’t available anywhere on the web. From the looks of it, it’s only available on iPhone via the Google app.
To use it, you’ll have to highlight the text you want to be “translated” in simpler terms while visiting a website inside the Google app. After that, you’ll have to tap on the Simplify icon that appears on the screen (you can see it in the image above).
Gemini will deliver a simpler version of the text, but not a summary. That’s an important distinction here. As Google explains, Simplify uses Gemini “to make complicated text more digestible,” without losing details. A summary will only get you the main points from a story, but you might lose information along the way.
Google says that research testing shows that Simplify users found that text was “significantly more helpful than the original complex text,” and retained information better.
Google offers a perfect example in the blog post detailing the research that went into creating Simplify: medical jargon. The screenshot above shows why Simplify is so brilliant. The AI makes the text easy to understand on the spot, without having to go to a separate app to have a chatbot translate the medical jargon for you.
Hopefully, Google will bring Simplify everywhere it offers AI tools, particularly in Google Search and Chrome.
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