Google is suspending the rollout of its AI-powered Ask Photos feature in Google Photos, which has been slowly expanding since last fall. “Ask Photos is not where it needs to be,” Jamie Aspinall, product manager of Google Photos, wrote in a post on X, responding to criticism, citing three factors: latency, quality, and user experience.
The experimental feature is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini artificial intelligence models. Specifically, it is a specialized version of the Gemini models, which Google says are “only used for Ask Photos.”
Aspinall said that Google has suspended the rollout of the feature “on very small numbers while we resolve these issues” and that in about two weeks the team will release a better version “that will return the speed and accuracy of search as in the original version.”
At the same time, Google also announced on Tuesday that keyword search in Photos is improving, allowing you to use quotes to find exact text matches in “file names, camera models, captions, or text in photos,” or search without quotes to include visual matches.
Google announced the feature last May at I/O 2024 and positioned it as a way to ask the Photos app for answers to common questions that would normally require another person to help with, such as what theme you’ve chosen for a child’s birthday party in the past or what national parks you’ve visited.
“Gemini’s multimodal capabilities can help you understand what exactly is happening in each photo, and even read the text in the image if necessary,” the company writes in the announcement. “Ask Photos then creates a helpful response and selects which photos and videos should be returned.”
This is not the first time Google has suspended the launch of an AI feature as the company competes in a rapidly intensifying AI arms race with other tech giants and startups.
Last May, a few weeks after the debut of the “Artificial Intelligence Review” in Google Search, the company suspended its launch after nonsensical and inaccurate answers went viral on social media with no way to opt out. Two high-profile examples: A feature named Barack Obama as the first Muslim president of the United States and recommended that users put glue on their pizza to keep the cheese on it.
And in February last year, Google launched its Gemini image generation tool with much fanfare, then suspended it the same month after users reported historical inaccuracies, such as an AI-generated image that depicted the US Founding Fathers as people of color.
