Google Search Live and AI Mode with Circle to Search, set to launch in India

The Google app for Android and iOS will host the new Search Live feature in India as it rolls out, visible with a new “Live” icon, with audio responses

Google Search, which has already received artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Flight Deals in recent months, is lining up the addition of a a number of new capabilities in the coming weeks. The tech giant confirms Search Live will soon be available for users in India, as well as AI Mode already working together with Circle to Search on smartphones, to make follow-up questions easier to navigate. This marks another chapter for Google, where India spearheads the arrival of new Search capabilities, and Google is taking a mobile-first approach this time around.

Search Live will roll out first in the US and India, and will be quite similar to Gemini Live. (Official photo)

Search Live will roll out first in the US (it's already available to users there) and India, and will be quite similar to Gemini Live which you may already have some experience with. Search Live will also leverage the smartphone’s camera to enable ambient context sharing, and will also have a voice conversation mode. “We’re always finding more ways to make search more helpful for people, and to make it really effortless to ask anything. We’re taking that to the next level, so now you can have a back and forth conversation with Google. We call this Search Live,” says Rajan Patel, Vice President, Engineering at Google Search, in a briefing of which HT was a part.

The Google app for Android and iOS will host the new Search Live feature in India as it rolls out, visible with a new “Live” icon, and with audio responses. Google says that Search Live works in the background, which means the conversation can continue seamlessly even if the user switches to another app on their phone. This, of course, uses Google’s Gemini models, albeit a custom version.

Google had given us a first glimpse of this personal universal AI assistant vision, at I/O earlier this summer. “Our vision is really this true manifestation of the AI assistant. Everyone heard for the first time today, an evolution of that and a further definition of what that means for us. Our vision really is to make Gemini the most personal, proactive and powerful assistant out there,” Angela Sun, Director of Product, Gemini apps, had told HT at the time.

Circle to Search, which has found popularity with its integration in Android phones over the past year and a bit more, will now plug into the AI Mode for follow-ups. Google points to an example of a user circling an image of chocolates on their phone screen, which then gets identified as Dubai Chocolate — they can follow this up into AI Mode to ask where they can buy it close to their present location.

Alongside, Google is pitching “agentic” capabilities in Search, by bringing Deep Search to AI Mode. “For questions where you want an even more thorough response, we are bringing deep research capabilities into the AI Mode through deep search with Gemini 2.5 Pro model,” says Hema Budaraju, Vice President, Product Management at Google Search. This however, will require a signed in user to be subscribed to the Google AI Pro plan for certain functionality to work. This is presently available in the US, and Google is expected to bring to India at some point in the coming months.

Google says the AI Overviews feature, which has been around since earlier this year, has clocked more than 2 billion monthly users in more than 200 countries, available in 40 languages. There is a 10% growth in the types of queries that show AI Overviews, they say. The AI Mode in Search too, has found significant traction — more than 100 million monthly active users in India and the US, and Google says queries with AI Mode are often 2-to-3 times the length of traditional searches. Visual search methods too are catching up by their metrics, up 70% through the course of the year and a claimed 25 billion Lens queries every month.