(May 20): Alphabet Inc’s Google is redesigning its iconic search box and adding new artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools, the latest steps in the company’s multibillion-dollar campaign to expand influence in the age of AI.
Google overhauled the search box to better handle the longer, more complicated queries people bring to chatbots. The firm is also planning to update the search engine with agents that can help people track topics of interest, make reservations and monitor their health, among other things. Some features will initially be limited to paying subscribers.
The focus on AI is “lighting up every part of the company”, chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said on stage on Tuesday at an annual developer conference in Mountain View, California. “All of the relentless shipping, the rapid advances in technology, it’s been a period of hyper progress.”
Google has been overhauling its business for the AI age, seeking to win over both everyday customers and corporate users. Pichai said changes to lean more into AI have helped increase usage of search. Popularity of the Gemini app, Google’s AI chatbot, has more than doubled in a year. It now has 900 million monthly users.
Google is also vying with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC for dominance in AI coding tools, a particularly lucrative market segment. In recent months, Google leaders have grown increasingly worried that the company has fallen behind rivals in AI coding.
Alphabet shares erased some losses on Tuesday. They were down about 1.7% at US$390.20 ($500.10) at 2.32pm in New York.
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During Tuesday’s event, the company rolled out several new tools for developers to write code using AI and manage agents under the banner of Antigravity, a platform Google released last year following the acquisition of talent and technology from start-up Windsurf in a US$2.4 billion deal. Google also unveiled a new version of its flagship AI model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, billed as its best model yet for coding.
Google said the model is faster by certain measures than rival offerings, and that it could be used more cheaply. Google said the “pro” version of the model, which offers better performance at a premium price, is being used within the company and would launch to the public next month.
“I think Google has a chance to catch up on AI coding,” said Ang Li, a former DeepMind researcher who is now the chief executive of Simular, a start-up developing AI agents. “It has a history of producing steady and slow wins.”
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Google is weaving coding features into Google Search as well. People who pay for a subscription to one of Google’s AI plans will be able to create custom dashboards in search to manage tasks such as planning a wedding or getting into a new fitness routine.
The company also introduced a new subscription plan through which developers can get more access to the company’s AI tools for US$100 per month.
With staggered launches like this, the gulf between the free and paid versions of Google search is growing. But Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president for knowledge and information, said the company is still focused on serving people who don’t pay for the product. “We’re incredibly committed to search being available to billions of users across the world,” Fox said in an interview.
Another new model, Gemini Omni, can be used to “create anything from any input”, Google said. With Omni, users will be able to generate videos from prompts including images, audio, video and text. It can also be used to edit video using simple, conversational language and is expected to eventually expand to generate images and audio.
With the rise of AI-generated video, Google will also increase its labelling of deepfakes. Pichai, after showing an image of himself dining with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk, said: “It’s obviously fake. I don’t eat hamburgers.”
The company also updated its Gemini app to make it a destination for consumers interested in experimenting with AI. Paid subscribers can opt into Daily Brief, a personalised morning summary of what’s on tap for the day ahead. Starting next week, subscribers will get access to an assistant, Gemini Spark.
“Spark represents a big shift for Gemini, transforming it from an assistant that can answer your questions into an active partner that does real work on your behalf and under your direction,” Josh Woodward, a vice-president at Google, wrote in a blog post published on Tuesday.
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The Gemini app was also redesigned in an aesthetic the company called “neural expressive”, featuring animations, bright colours and haptic feedback.
The design echoes the makeover of the search box, which Google called the biggest update to the product in more than a quarter-century. The search box will expand for longer queries, make it easier to upload files and pictures and do more to help users draft their searches. It is part of Google’s effort to help users search for information in the most natural way possible, Fox said.
“You should just be able to bring whatever question is in your mind just type it into the search box,” Fox said. “We can broaden people’s aperture in terms of what they understand that search can do.”
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