Google’s AI Mode arrives in Spanish globally (techcrunch.com)

Google has rolled out AI Mode — its immersive, Gemini-powered conversational search experience — to Spanish-speaking users worldwide. The feature lets people pose natural-language queries, hold back-and-forth conversations, upload images for multimodal queries, and dig deeper into complex topics inside Search. Google first expanded AI Mode beyond the U.S., U.K., and India to 180 countries in August, and has since added Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese; the Spanish launch follows those language additions and comes alongside related product moves like conversational photo editing on Android and broader availability of its lower-cost Google AI Plus subscription. The update matters because it broadens real-world access to multimodal, transactional and conversational search — not just passive summaries — which can change how users research, shop and book services. Advanced capabilities, available to Google AI Ultra subscribers, already include tasks like requesting restaurant reservations and point toward future support for other appointments and ticket purchases, indicating deeper integration between AI assistance and commerce. The rollout also sharpens competition with offerings such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Go and highlights a challenge for users: distinguishing AI Mode (a full chat-driven experience with Gemini) from simpler AI Overviews that provide quick, static summaries at the top of search results.