Google is introducing its conversational AI search tool, Search Live, to India – launching it first in English and Hindi. The company is also extending its AI Mode to seven additional Indian languages, a sign of its growing investment in one of its most dynamic and expanding markets.
Originally released in the United States in July, Search Live draws upon Google’s Project Astra system. It allows users to hold their phone up to an object and engage in a spoken exchange, with the AI interpreting both words and images in real time. The result is a kind of dialogue between person and machine , one that blends human curiosity with mechanical observation.
Google Chose India to Refine Its Next-Gen AI Features
India is the second country to gain access to the feature, a choice that reflects Google’s reliance on the country’s large population of early technology adopters. These users have already helped the company refine products such as the Gemini Nano Banana model. Google intends to use India’s varied environments – its streets, signs, and daily scenes – to expand the range of visual understanding that trains its systems.
“People in India are power users of multimodal search, forming our largest user base for both voice and visual search globally,” said Hema Budaraju, vice president for product management at Google Search. Her remark, though offered as praise, also reveals the company’s intent: to learn from India’s immense diversity and feed that knowledge back into the machine, making its gaze sharper and its voice more certain.
How Search Live Works and How to Access It
Search Live began reaching users in India today and will continue to spread in the coming weeks. Once it appears, people will be able to open it by touching the “Live” symbol beneath the search bar in the Google app, or by launching Lens and choosing “Live” from the bottom of the screen. The process is simple enough, though it signals the quiet entry of a new kind of machine intelligence into everyday life.
Earlier this year, Google disclosed that Search Live runs on a custom-built version of its Gemini model. The Gemini app itself already includes a feature known as Gemini Live, released in May, which performs nearly the same function. The resemblance between the two names is bound to cause some confusion, the kind that slips easily into the machinery of modern technology.
AI Mode Expands to Seven Indian Languages
Alongside the rollout, Google has extended its AI Mode to seven Indian languages: Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The expansion is part of a broader global push, bringing AI Mode to more than 35 additional languages and 40 new countries and territories. With this, Google’s AI-powered search now reaches well over 200 countries and territories – a spread that shows both the reach of its ambition and the quiet inevitability of its advance.
Google’s AI Mode, first introduced in the United States in March and extended to more users two months later, allows people to pose layered and intricate questions through an intelligent interface. It reached India in June and spread to other regions in August. Only last month, Google added five more languages – among them Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese – widening the tool’s reach and ambition.
Balancing Innovation and the Open Web
According to Hema Budaraju, Google’s vice president for product management in Search, the company’s custom Gemini model gives AI Mode its strength. Yet the rise of AI-powered search has not passed without dispute. Critics say that tools such as AI Mode and AI Overviews are drawing attention away from publishers and shrinking the traffic that once sustained independent websites. Google rejects this claim, insisting that its technology does not weaken the open web but merely changes the way people reach it. Whether that defense will hold in the long run remains to be seen.
Final Words
The introduction of Search Live and the addition of AI Mode to its already seven additional Indian languages, prove what we already assumed: that we are not users, we are unpaid research assistants who are training the algorithm and believe that we are receiving a new fun toy. The irony is delicious. Google glorifies the Indians as power users and at the same time transforms our daily commutes into data gathering adventures. We speak Malayalam, take pictures in Mumbai, and in Mountain View, some server is purring with satisfaction. Google is assuring that the web is fine, it is just different.
