Google has been rapidly integrating AI features into most of its apps and services. In October last year, the company started rolling out a new AI feature within Google Photos called “Ask Photos.” While the company was quietly expanding the feature, it has now paused the rollout of Ask Photos, citing three major factors.
Google paused the rollout of “Ask Photos” after complaints
The announcement came on X by Jamie Aspinall, who is a project manager for Google Photos. Replying to a post on X by David Lieb, Aspinall noted, “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality, and UX.”
He further added that the rollout of Ask Photos has been paused at very small numbers while the team addresses these issues. Google will roll out its “improved version” to Google Photos in nearly two weeks that can match the “speed and recall of the original search.”
Besides pausing the rollout of Ask Photos, the company yesterday announced that keyword search in Photos is getting better. Thanks to the improvement, you can now use quotes to find exact matches within filenames, camera models, captions, and more. Not to forget, you can always search without quotes to include visual matches.
For the uninitiated, Google announced the Ask Photos feature at last year’s I/O event. The company then said that using the power of Gemini, Ask Photos can search for results based on natural questions. Unfortunately, there were a lot of complaints about its performance, which resulted in Google pausing its rollout within Photos.
The company has also paused other AI features in the past
Well, this isn’t the first time Google has paused an AI feature. Apart from Ask Photos, Google last year paused “AI Overviews” within weeks of launching it. The company reportedly received a lot of complaints about nonsensical and inaccurate answers.
