Google just touted some big numbers regarding its AI Overviews feature during its I/O conference. On the stage, company CEO Sundar Pichai said that the service has 1.5 billion monthly users. That's around 18 percent of the total human population of planet Earth, give or take.
For the remaining 82 percent of humanity, AI Overviews are those little recaps that appear at the top of Google queries. These primarily appear when the search engine is asked a question, with the company saying they only show up for more complex questions, where the systems recognize that they're helpful beyond what the rest of the results page offers.
We asked the company what that 1.5 billion number actually means, being how the recaps spawn automatically. Google responded by saying the number is a measure of people who have seen AI Overviews in their results. It also noted that the overwhelming majority of these users engage with the service in some meaningful way. The company continued by saying that users are interacting with it, which leads them to "search more often."
Google says that Overviews are driving a 10 percent increase in search engine usage, with regard to the types of queries that show AI-generated results. The biggest markets for this feature are the US and India. Back in October, Google pledged to bring the platform to 100 new countries and hoped to one-day reach one billion users per month. It looks like the company has sailed past that.
The company has also been busy bringing it to even more regions. All told, Overviews is available in more than 200 countries and in 40 languages. It's even been testing a similar service for YouTube.
Of course, this is AI. The Overviews feature may be inching toward omnipresence, but that doesn't mean it's always correct. The service has been known to make stuff up, get things wrong or just act plain goofy.
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