Google announced that the feature that generates summaries of user queries in the company’s search engine is now available outside the United States. This comes two months after the search giant was forced to limit the availability of the feature due to problems with generating correct summaries, which were observed at the time of the initial launch.
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In May, Google made AI-generated summaries that appeared before organic links in the search engine available to all users in the United States. Prior to this, the company had been testing this tool with a limited number of users for almost a year. However, soon after the launch, the innovation was criticized, and many screenshots appeared on the Internet demonstrating inaccuracies in the generated reports. For example, when searching for a pizza recipe, the search engine recommended adding glue to hold the cheese in place.
Google acknowledged the problem and announced an update that was supposed to correct the situation with inaccurate summaries. As a result, certain restrictions were introduced along with the update, due to which AI-generated reports began to appear in response to only certain user requests. In addition to this, Google has prohibited its neural network from generating summaries based on user-generated content from social networks such as Reddit.
«I have enough evidence to say that the quality is only improving,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s chief product officer, told reporters. She added that data collected by Google on the use of AI-generated summaries indicates that users report higher levels of satisfaction with the quality of the feature.
Against this background, Google decided to open access to summaries in the search engine to a wider range of users. Now you can see them not only in the USA, but also in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and the UK. Moreover, it supports not only English, but also several other languages, including Hindi and Portuguese.