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Google unveiled Search Live at I/O 2025, a new AI product that brings the multimodal AI capabilities of Project Astra to Google Search on mobile phones. Put differently, Search Live also allows the AI to see what you see in the real world in addition to hearing your voice commands. The AI will provide answers in real-time to the questions you might have about what it can see. However, most of the new features Google showed at the event were made available to Labs users, rather than the general public. Four months later, Google launched Search Live officially in the U.S.
Android and iPhone users can try the new Search Live feature without going through Labs experiments. A new button in the Google app on Android and iPhone, and in Google Lens, will let them have interactive voice conversations in Google’s AI Mode, with the AI having access to the camera’s live video feed.
How to use Search Live on Android and iPhone
Google detailed the new Search Live functionality in a blog post on Wednesday. Search Live will work in the Google and Google Lens apps, but only English is supported.
Users will have to open the Google app and tap a new Live icon that appears under the search bar (image above). Once they do that, they’ll share the camera feed with the AI, and the AI will be able to see what they see in real-time. Users can ask questions about their environment, as seen in the examples Google posted on YouTube.
A similar procedure is available if users are already pointing the smartphone camera to something when using Google Lens. They can tap the new Live button that appears at the bottom of the screen (image below). Camera sharing will already be enabled in this scenario. All you need to do is start asking questions, and the AI will respond.
What can Search Live do?
Google
Google also detailed a few types of interactions you could have with Search Live. For example, users might use Search Live while traveling to ask the AI questions about their new surroundings and find points of interest. Another example concerns playing board games with family and friends while on vacation. Rather than reading the rules for each new game, you can engage the AI via Search Live and ask questions about your options.
Google shared a few YouTube Shorts videos that show how easy it is to have the AI provide instructions for crafting “the perfect cup of matcha,” getting help for setting up a home theater system, or completing school homework. In all instances, the smartphone user fires up Search Live on the handset, points the camera to their surroundings, whether it’s the kitchen, the TV setup, or an elephant toothpaste experiment for school, and asks AI Mode questions about the task at hand. The AI is able to recognize what it sees in the video stream and provides quick answers to the user’s questions.
