Google’s AI Overview Could Be Much Better if It Had These Features

Key Takeaways

• Google’s AI Overviews should allow users to choose topics they want to view AI-generated summaries.
• Integrating AI Overviews with note-taking apps like Google Keep for quick access and adding a fact-check feature might also help.
• Adding more multimedia content to the overview and integrating the tool with Gemini might also help improve the user experience.

Google’s AI Overviews are far from perfect. But the tool has come a long way since its days of suggesting users add glue to pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off. That said, I think there’s still plenty of room for improvement, and I believe Google’s AI Overviews feature would be better if it included some of these features.

1 Allow Users to Choose Topics They Want to View AI Overviews For

The AI Overviews tool offers a summary of a topic or query, usually based on several different online sources. As such, when they appear, they appear at the top of Google’s search results page.

While these summaries can be useful, a glaring limitation is that I cannot control which topics these overviews appear for. If, instead, the user can choose the topics they want to view AI Overviews (for instance, recipes or tech), this tool might provide more value rather than overwhelming users with either obvious or irrelevant information that becomes a distraction.

2 Integration With Google Keep for Quick Note-Taking

Despite its faults, Google’s AI Overviews can be fairly useful, especially when the information presented is relevant and accurate. However, at present, if you want to refer to this summary again, your only options are to export it to Gmail or a Google Doc. I think this is fairly inconvenient if all you want to do is capture a few key points quickly.

I wouldprefer it if AI Overviews were integrated with a note-taking app like Google Keep. This would allow the user to export specific parts of the summary quickly without having to navigate to a whole other app/interface.

3 Adding a Public Fact-Check Feature Where Users Can Vote on Accuracy

While you can manually check where Google’s AI Overviews gets its information, the technology can sometimes mistakenly source inaccurate or irrelevant data, which means mistakes slip into these summaries.

To reduce inaccuracies of this sort, I think it would help if Google added a public fact-check feature, which allows users to vote on the accuracy of the information presented. Too many inaccurate reports should either flag the summary to Google or warn users about potential credibility issues so they don’t take the information at face value.

4 Embed Multimedia Content for More Engaging Overviews

AI Overviews has changed the way people find information online. However, Google’s AI summaries can be greatly improved by adding multimedia content within the overviews themselves.

This way, people who would rather watch a video or view images/infographics to better understand the topic can do so without leaving the search results page or having to navigate to other platforms to stream videos on the topic.

5 Integration With Gemini for Follow-Up Questions

I don’t think generative AI should be shoved into every app I use, and I’m often happy to use applications and services without AI features. However, integrating Gemini into Google’s AI Overviews seems like a natural next step and could become quite the game-changer if and when it happens.

So, instead of only presenting users with a fixed summary, Google could give users the option to ask follow-up questions based on the AI-generated summary, making the experience far more interactive.

Whether you like it or not, AI Overviews are here to stay. However, if you find the experience more distracting than useful, consider turning the AI Overviews off until the experience improves and is more in line with what you need.