Google is rolling out its AI Mode search experience to everyone in the US starting today. The chatbot-style addition to the company's search engine results page is designed to answer longer queries and uses Google's AI model to generate full responses based on--and linking back to--indexed websites on the open web. AI Mode is Google's direct response to the release of search engines from Silicon Valley startups like OpenAI and Perplexity, which provide chatbot-style answers to questions and queries. If all of this feels like déjà vu, that's because at last year's Google I/O developer conference, the company rolled out AI Mode's precursor, AI Overviews. In 2024, Google started to use its machine intelligence model to summarize the contents of the web and plaster a block of text at the top of the results for some queries.

The news: OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with its flagship large language model in a major update. You can have a spoken conversation with the chatbot as if you were making a call, and it's also able to answer questions about images. How it works: The ability to talk to ChatGPT draws on two separate models. Whisper, OpenAI's existing speech-to-text model, converts what you say into text, which is then fed to the chatbot. And a new text-to-speech model converts ChatGPT's responses into spoken words.