A new experimental Google app for Windows (blog.google)

Google has launched an experimental Google app for Windows in Labs that provides an instant, system-wide search experience — press Alt + Space to pull up results from your local files, installed apps, Google Drive, and the web without switching windows. The app includes built-in Google Lens so you can select anything on screen to run visual searches, translate text/images, or get step-by-step help (for example, with homework problems). An optional “AI Mode” surfaces deeper, generative responses with follow-up question support and curated links. The feature is currently opt-in through Labs. For the AI/ML community this is a notable push toward tightly integrated, multimodal assistant UIs: it fuses local file/system search, cloud storage, web retrieval, vision-based OCR/understanding (Lens), and generative responses into a single hotkey-triggered workflow. That convergence raises practical implications for model latency, routing (edge vs cloud inference), indexing and retrieval strategies, and UI design for follow-ups and grounding. It also spotlights privacy and permission trade-offs when search spans local files and cloud content. As an experimental product, it’s a useful case study in real-world multimodal assistant deployment and the engineering challenges of safe, responsive, context-aware search across device and cloud.