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ZDNET's key takeaways
Google's AI Mode can now suggest restaurant reservations.
Users can also now receive personalized dining recommendations.
Google is aiming to build a more dynamic and personalized web.
AI Mode can now find restaurant reservations, Google announced in a blog post Thursday. Users can now request reservations in local restaurants according to constraints like party size and dietary restrictions, and the system will automatically respond with available options.
Also: I used Perplexity to make a restaurant reservation
Google upgraded AI Mode in search with more agency in an effort to make the feature more autonomous and personalized to the unique preferences of individual users. The idea is to deliver a smarter search engine that can actually take useful action on behalf of users, and read between the lines of prompts to provide helpful information even when users aren't precisely sure what they're looking for.
So far, those agentic actions are pretty mundane, but they hint toward a not-so-distant future in which the online search experience feels more like a two-way conversation between human users and AI.
"AI Mode does the legwork and links you directly to the booking page, so you can easily take the last step and finalize your reservation," Google writes in its blog post. The feature leverages Project Mariner, Google's web-browsing AI agent, and was developed in partnership with OpenTable, Resy, SeatGeek, Ticketmaster, and other booking services. It's being rolled out now to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S.
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