- AI Mode can now find you dinner reservation options based on your preferences
- It’ll soon be able to find you concert tickets too
- US users can get even more personalized results
Google has given its AI Mode a major upgrade by giving it agentic capabilities that will help you find a restaurant table – and I’m more than impressed with how well it works.
When Google added AI Overviews to search you could almost hear a collective sigh of “Why?” go out around the world. There seemed to be a consensus that there was too much AI in everything, and we didn’t need it, especially in search.
But over time AI Overviews – a kind of summary of answers to whatever you asked – have started to prove more and more useful, and these days I quite often get something good from the AI Overview without having to scroll down the list of search results.
Next came AI Mode, a full-on AI search engine that occupies the first of the tabs on the Google search page, and is similar to ChatGPT Search and Perplexity. It uses AI to search the web, so if you want to do natural language searching, rather than keyword-based searching as you do in a normal Google search, it’s much more catered to your needs.
Now Google has gone even further and given its AI Mode agentic qualities specifically for finding available restaurant slots for you, so it can do a little bit more digging, and get better results, than a standard AI Mode search would.
Bon appétit
So, if you enter AI Mode in Google then ask about getting a dinner reservation for four, name a date, time and location and, of course, the type of restaurant or food you’re interested in, AI Mode can now speed up the process, giving you a list of options for restaurants that meet your specific needs and which have free reservation slots.
There are limitations: AI Mode can’t go as far as booking the table for you just yet, but it will link you directly to the booking page, so it puts the decision right into your hands.
I’ve tried it out for restaurants in my local area, and it worked very well. I even doubted that one of the very good restaurants would have a free table at that time, but I was wrong!
AI Mode even told me that there was no point in trying to book at my preferred venue since it was closed on a Sunday evening, and recommended some other options.
Tickets soon
Google says it’s working with OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, Booksy and many more to make this experience possible, which means that concert tickets could be the next thing AI Mode is able to help you reserve.
Users in the US who have opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs will get even more personalized results, which will use your previous conversations along with places you’ve searched or tapped on in Maps. So, if you ask, “I’ve got half an hour for lunch, where should I go?”, it will use this information to recommend somewhere that fits your preferences.
While AI being integrated into Google search may have started off as an annoyance, it’s slowly becoming a set of really helpful tools that might even start to turn the tables and get ChatGPT-maker OpenAI worried.
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