5 Features to Add to Googles AI Overview

Google's AI Overviews are far from perfect. But the tool has come a long way. There's still room for improvement, though, and Google's AI Overviews would be better if it included some of these features.

1. Allow users to select the topics they want to see AI Overviews for

AI Overviews provide summaries of a topic or query, often based on a number of different online sources. As a result, they appear at the top of Google search results.

While these summaries can be useful, one obvious limitation is that you can’t control the topics that these overviews appear on. Instead, if users could choose the topics they want to see on AI Overviews (e.g., recipes or technology), the tool could provide more value than overwhelming users with distractingly obvious or irrelevant information.

2. Integrate with Google Keep for quick note taking

Despite its flaws, Google’s AI Overviews can be quite useful, especially when the information presented is relevant and accurate. However, right now, if you want to refer back to this summary, the only option is to export it to Gmail or a Google Doc, which is inconvenient if all you want to do is quickly jot down a few key points.

It would be nice if AI Overviews were integrated with a note-taking app like Google Keep . This would allow users to quickly export specific parts of the summary without having to navigate to a completely different app/interface.

3. Add a public fact-checking feature where users can vote on accuracy

While you can manually check the sources of information that Google's AI Overviews pull from, the technology can sometimes accidentally pull in incorrect or irrelevant data, which means errors will creep into these summaries.

To reduce misinformation like this, Google should add a public fact-checking feature that allows users to vote on the accuracy of the information presented. Too many inaccurate reports should flag the summary to Google or alert users to potential reliability issues so they don’t take the information as true.

4. Embed multimedia content for a more engaging overview

AI Overviews have changed the way people find information online. However, Google 's AI summary could be significantly improved by adding multimedia content to the overview.

This way, people who want to watch a video or view an image/infographic to better understand a topic can do so without leaving the search results page or having to navigate to other platforms to stream videos on that topic.

5. Integrate with Gemini to answer follow-up questions

Generative AI shouldn’t be baked into every app you use, and many people are happy to use apps or services without AI features. But integrating Gemini into Google’s AI Overviews seems like a natural next step, and could be a game-changer if and when it happens.

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

Whether you like it or not, AI Overviews are here to stay. However, if you find the experience more distracting than helpful, consider turning off AI Overviews  until the experience improves and better suits your needs.