Google’s AI-powered search feature, SGE (Search Generative Experience), is adding new capabilities starting today. SGE, which brings conversational mode to Search, will now have the ability to generate images using prompts directly within SGE, similar to Bing’s support for OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. Additionally, users can now write drafts in SGE, customizing the output to be longer or shorter or changing the writing tone to be more serious or casual.
These new features follow a series of rapid updates to SGE as AI technology continues to advance. SGE has recently gained the ability to generate AI-powered summaries, create definitions for unfamiliar terms, and introduce coding improvements, and travel and product search features, among other enhancements.
With the new AI image generation feature, users can provide a prompt specifying the type of image they want, such as a drawing, photo, or painting. SGE will return four results directly within the conversational experience, and users can tap on the images to download them as .png files or edit the prompt to generate a new set. This feature is powered by Google’s Imagen text-to-image model.
The same feature will also be available in Google Image search. If users can’t find the desired photo in the image search results, they can create a new image using prompts from a box that appears within the results.
To ensure responsible use of this technology and prevent inappropriate content, Google is limiting the new image generation feature to users aged 18 and older, despite SGE recently becoming available to U.S. teens aged 13-17. Google has implemented strict filtering policies to prevent harmful, misleading, or explicit content and to block images containing photorealistic faces and prompts mentioning notable people.
The generated images will contain embedded metadata that identifies them as AI-generated, as well as invisible watermarking powered by SynthID, a technology announced by Google Cloud and Google DeepMind.
The other new feature expands on SGE’s role as a writing assistant. SGE could already provide a written draft, and now it can generate different types of writing, change the tone, and adjust the length to be longer or shorter. Users can export their writing to Google Workspace apps like Gmail or Google Docs. Images generated can be saved to Google Drive.
Both features will roll out to a portion of SGE users starting tomorrow and expand to the wider user base over the coming weeks. They are available to those who have opted in to use SGE via Google Search Labs and are initially offered in English in the U.S., although SGE was recently introduced in India and Japan.