Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
One practical use case for AI natural language processing is being able to search your photos with the ease of a conversational prompt. As a result, Google unveiled a feature called Ask Photos last year and started rolling out early access to users via Google Labs in September. The feature finally rolled out to me -- and the results were surprising.
I was excited to try it out for myself. Even though I am a long-time iPhone user, I've used Google Photos for about a decade for the additional photo storage and the impressive search interface. Even though the classic search experience isn't marketed as an AI feature, it has always been super efficient and better than those found on alternatives like Apple Photos.
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With the classic search in Google Photos, I could search terms like "cake," "hot dog," "red dress," or "beach trip," and it would filter through my many photos and find the results instantaneously. With Google Photos already setting such a high bar, I expected the AI-enhanced Ask Photos to exceed my expectations.
It did not. However, the feature has promise, and here are some ways Google can improve it. (I also include some tips on getting the most out of Ask Photos today.)
1. Differentiate it from the classic search experience
To get started, in Ask Photos I searched "photos of me as a baby" and was met with the message, "I didn't find any photos of you as a baby, but I might have missed them!"
However, when I typed in the search "baby photos," much like the classic search, it was able to show me all the pictures of babies in my library, which included the ones of me I was looking for.
Even though I was able to pull up the photos I wanted, to get there, I had to search the same key term I regularly do in classic search. The result was I wasted my time trying to use conversational terms rather than thinking of a keyword that populates what I was looking for.
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