Google's AI Search Live makes search a conversation and Googling might never be the same (www.techradar.com)

Google announced that Search Live — a multimodal, conversational version of Google Search that listens to voice queries and can use your phone camera for visual context — is now generally available in the U.S. Accessible from the Google app (and via a Live button inside Lens), the feature lets you speak naturally, point your camera at an object or scene, and carry on a back-and-forth conversation while the AI provides real‑time explanations, clickable sources, and deeper web links. Under the hood Google uses a “query fan-out” approach: instead of answering only the exact query, the system simultaneously hunts for related answers to produce a broader, more contextual response. For the AI/ML community this matters because it operationalizes multimodal search at massive scale — combining vision, speech, and conversational LLM-style reasoning in a product with billions of users. Key implications: improved user workflows (hands-free, real-world assistance) and new UX patterns for search; greater pressure on vision model robustness (lighting, angles, ambiguity) and retrieval-quality of linked sources; and intensified competition with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple on multimodal assistants. Google emphasizes guardrails (no face ID-style lookups) and surfaces links so Search Live is a guide, not an authority — but accuracy, privacy tradeoffs, and ethical edge cases remain central challenges as conversational, camera-aware search becomes the new default.