Google Search AI Mode Can Help You Make Dinner Reservations

Google released AI Mode as a Google Search experiment earlier this year in the U.S., bringing a ChatGPT-like experience to its flagship product. Google then made AI Mode available to all Google Search users in the U.S., U.K., and India, plus expanded the capabilities of this AI-centric search feature. On Thursday, Google announced that AI Mode is going global, making the feature available to over 180 countries.

Also, Google announced new features for AI Mode that will make the experience even more useful. AI Mode can help you make dinner reservations, but this agentic AI capability will be available only in the U.S. at first.

Unlike the more controversial AI Overviews feature in Google Search, AI Mode can be more helpful, allowing users to have conversations with Gemini without going to the Gemini app. All you have to do is tap the AI Mode tab in Google Search and start chatting with the AI. This is a more intentional use of AI inside Google Search than AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results regardless of whether you want AI summaries or not.

The AI Mode experience will roll out to more than 180 new countries and territories, but it will be available in English initially. More languages will be available in the future. Google also said it'll expand the feature to more regions, likely meaning the European Union, which isn't part of this wider rollout.

International users won't be able to take advantage of the first agentic features in AI Mode. Google has integrated some of the capabilities of Project Mariner, an AI agent introduced earlier this year, into the AI Mode experience to bring more complex functionality to AI Mode, like helping users book restaurant reservations. The feature will be restricted to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., the Gemini tier that costs $250/month, as an "Agentic capabilities in AI Mode" Labs experiment.

AI Mode will assist with dinner reservations by performing all the online searches you'd do in Google Search. The feature lets you input the desired conditions, like the party size, date and time, location, and type of restaurant. Once you've figured out the details, AI Mode will search for the places that best match your requirements. It'll then show a list of restaurants that have availability for your date and time, and it'll take you to the booking page. AI Mode doesn't complete the reservation for you. That's the last step of the process, where the human will be in control of choosing the time and actually making the reservation, as seen below.

Google

Google explained in a blog post that the new AI Mode reservation capability relies on multiple Google products, including Project Mariner, the Knowledge Graph, and Google Maps. Partners including OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, and Booksy are also cited. Google wants AI Mode to also help with local service appointments and buying tickets online in the future. The restaurant booking tool is the first test.

Google also said that it's looking to offer more personalized experiences to AI Mode users, like surfacing places to eat that are based on the user's preferences. For the feature to work, you'll have to let AI Mode remember your past conversations. Google offers an example of a complex search you might make with AI Mode which could benefit from that past information: "I only have an hour, need a quick lunch spot, any suggestions?"

To answer this prompt, AI Mode will look at your past chats in Google Search and the places you've searched for in Google Search and Google Maps. It'll then deliver a response that includes results tailored to the user's preferences. Like the previous feature, this is only an experiment in Labs available to U.S. AI Mode users.

Finally, AI Mode received a new sharing feature that's similar to what you can do in ChatGPT and Gemini with chats you want friends and family to see. The new "Share" button in AI Mode will let you share a specific chat with your contacts. What's interesting about the feature is that friends and family can then continue the chat with Gemini in AI Mode where you left off. They can ask follow-up questions on the same topic instead of just reading the text and clicking the links that AI Mode makes available. The "Share" button, found at the bottom of an AI Mode reply, will be available only to U.S. users initially.