Transcript

Alistair 00:00:00 Unlike normal product development, we didn't go extremely deep on design and write long product requirement documents. The whole spec was three pages and we just threw some people at it and we built a prototype and as soon as we did that, we realized we were onto something.

Voiceover 00:00:14 Welcome to the Made by Google podcast, where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host, Rashid Finge.

Rachid 00:00:23 Today we're talking to Erin Lynch and Alistair Pot who work closely with the teams that made Circle to Search.

Voiceover 00:00:30 This is the Made by Google podcast.

Rachid 00:00:32 Erin, you've been at Google 14 years, you've worked on products like the Google Assistant, Google Pay Keep, and now Circle to Search. How is working on Circle to Search different from what came before?

Erin 00:00:44 Yeah, Rachid, it's pretty impressive what we were able to do, bringing Google's most well-known product, biggest used product to an operating system that we own Android and making it really easy and accessible for people to fulfill their curiosity. Our mission is to bring the world's information to people and make it easier to access and that's exactly what we've done. So it's been amazing.

Rachid 00:01:09 Alistair, you were at Google for six years and then you left and then you came back. Why is that?

Alistair 00:01:15 Yeah, great question. I love Google. I had a great time at Google. I worked mostly on Google Play, but I did a number of other things as well, but I'm generally an impatient person. I like to try new things and so I felt that I needed to go and see how things get done at other big companies. And so I spent four years, I sometimes took in the world in this, but actually at great companies learning a lot from other companies and ultimately just decided that Google is my home and so decided to come back. I always seek like opportunities where there's an impactful role or a product that is very, very impactful and as Aaron was talking about, search is just enormously impactful 25 years of making people's lives better. And so I joined the search team and it's been a great year and a half since coming back.

Rachid 00:01:57 Amazing. So onto new things then Circle to Search. Let's just get everyone on the same page first. What is Circle to Search and how would I use it?

Erin 00:02:05 Great question. So it's on Android only and on Pixel and Samsung phones right now. And what you can do is at the bottom of the screen, long press on the home handle or the home button depending on which setting you have and that's it. What happens is we pop up this AI overlay and allow you to circle what you're curious about and within milliseconds we return results to fulfill that curiosity.

Rachid 00:02:32 So I can circle like what text images? Yep.

Erin 00:02:36 Anything and you can even combine the two. So one beloved feature is the ability to circle something visual and then tap the search box and keep adding questions to refine your query. People are getting a lot of value out of that.

Rachid 00:02:48 We've had visual searching for a while on Android through Google Lens. How would you say Circle to Search is different from Lens?

Alistair 00:02:55 So Circle to Search actually works with Lens. A lot of the technology is in fact Lens, the visual searching capabilities OCR on the screen. The key differences are rarely that it's universally available Sarah and described this, but you can invoke Circle to Search over any app. You can be doing anything on your phone and call on Google to satisfy curiosity about what you're seeing and that is a huge difference. We also made some differences to the UI. We added a little shimmer that we really love and of course we introduced the circle gesture itself. So now instead of uh, only tapping on things, you can also circle things to let Google know what you're curious about.

Rachid 00:03:33 Yeah, I love the shimmer and the sort of feeling that your phone makes when you keep the button pressed right on the bottom. That's really great. I'm curious about the origin story of Circle to Search if there is one. I imagine maybe someone one day stormed into a room and said, Hey, I've got this great idea. How did this start? Like who came up with this and how do you build it into an actual product? Yeah,

Alistair 00:03:53 There was no, as far as I know, Eureka moment with someone storming into a room and shouting, I've got it instead. I think that most folks knew that lenses really rarely powerful, but also it's a bit of a pain sometimes to have to take a screenshot and share it with lenses. So we'd often dreamed about what could it take to bring Lens to anywhere on the phone. And so we'd been thinking about this and, and muddling on it and the idea of making it easy for natural and intuitive for people to satisfy their curiosity. And then in January or so of last year, we actually decided, let's kick this off. Let's see how we could do it. And the way that we decided to do that was by building a prototype. So unlike normal product development, we didn't go extremely deep on design and write long product requirement documents. The whole spec was three pages and we just threw some people at it and we built a prototype and as soon as we did that we realized we were onto something. It was just, it just felt so good immediately that we then began to invest quite heavily in the product.

Erin 00:04:52 So it was this really exciting opportunity where Android woke up and thought, wow, what could we bring? In fact there was a big debate too about the circle gesture itself because tapping is the way lens has always worked and tapping is actually faster. But we very quickly learned, as Alistair pointed out, once we had the prototype in our hand, wow, it is delightful to circle. It just feels more intuitive. It feels like you're more participant in the use case and in the scenario. Um, and so it was really fun.

Rachid 00:05:21 I guess often it's not easy to sort of make something that's equally powerful and easy to use. That was probably the goal of Circle to Search in a way.

Alistair 00:05:30 Without a doubt. We constantly have been talking about natural and intuitive. Those are words that we speak a lot about, uh, helping users to, to satisfy their information needs. We also have been extremely focused on speed. A lot of the magic of Circle to Search is how quick it is to use and then also how quick it is to get back to what you were doing. We don't want to be in your way, we wanna get in help you and then get out of your way so that you can carry on with what you were doing.

Rachid 00:05:53 Are there any favorite examples already that you've seen people use Circle to Search maybe yourself, do you have any experience of something that was maybe harder to do in the past that is now really easy and fun to do on your phone?

Alistair 00:06:06 I was gonna call out using Circle to Search on text, like it's a very visual product but in fact it works extremely well when selecting text you can just draw a line through the text or scribble over text to select it. Um, and I use it very, very often on that. I've found over time that I use it more and more for text and we've seen this in the data with real people as well. They are slowly learning, oh wow, this is a really quick way to search text. And along with text, uh, use case that I, especially when traveling have been leaning on is translate. So as soon as you select text, you can immediately translate it and we just launched a full screen translate, so there's now a little button that'll actually translate the whole screen in place, which is pretty magical

Erin 00:06:46 Right now it's just filling my toxic trait, which is celebrity news and look for pictures of celebrities out in the world. It's terrible. Um, but now whenever I'm doing that, you know, killing time, I can trigger circle to search and just check out, ooh, what's that bag? Who made the bag? How much is it? Are there any knockoffs? Ooh, what is that shoe? That's kind of a new style I haven't seen before. So that's my favorite use case right now I'm shameful to admit

Rachid 00:07:13 I wanted to pick up on something you mentioned. So it's called Circle to Search, but it could have maybe also been scribbled to search or or or draw a line to search. So two questions there. First of all, when it comes to circling like do I need to be really good and precise with my circling or is that not really necessary? So like how do you fully understand what I've been intending to search? And maybe the same question also for the scribbling and the lines. How do you make that work and understand what I'm trying to get?

Alistair 00:07:39 Very interesting question and the answer in brief is no, you don't have to be very precise at all. We have found that users are quite precise even when they're doing it very, very quickly. But as soon as you invoke circle to search on device only, we are analyzing what is on the screen and segmenting it. So we do a lot of optical character recognition to figure out where the strings are that are selectable and then lenses are just phenomenal on device models that can also detect the objects on the screen. And so when you're doing a circle with very, very finely tuned the region selection over lots and lots of testing so that it's extremely accurate, we have a prototype with a very, very thick line that can sometimes feel imprecise because you really like can't do very, very fine drawing and it just works perfectly. It works really, really well because of all this technology that we've built into the product.

Erin 00:08:29 Yeah, and to add to that too, my favorite thing to do is Circle to Search is great when you need to grab a lot of text to ask a question about it. I've learned over time to grab from the first word to the last word and we're smart enough to select it all and oftentimes an AI answer comes up. I don't wanna understate how interesting that is. Our users as we're learning from them are wowed by search generative experiences and my favorite thing is to grab a bunch of text and have AI answer or explain something to me. For example, sometimes I'm reading an article and there's something inferred in the words that I don't get and so if I highlight it often AI will help fill me in on what they're trying to get across in the sentence.

Alistair 00:09:11 I totally agree. It often feels very magical to do that.

Rachid 00:09:14 I'm wondering what it feels like to work on the product that started it all like over 25 years ago. I mean we all know the text box and we added voice search search or Google lens. Now you get the chance to add another way of accessing the search engine. What does it feel like to work on that?

Alistair 00:09:31 It's been really, really fun. So the first is like we both believe and the team believes this actually is making search more natural and intuitive for people. So we all became product managers to build products that people love and so that's been great. Erin alluded to this but this has also been a project that's required a lot of cross Google collaboration. You know, we work super closely with the lens team with all sorts of search teams and then the Android team as well and it's been really, really fun to see the company just come together and work across organizational lines. I've loved that. And then lastly the product is cool, like I'm , I'm proud of the fact that it is cool. This is the first time in my career that my mom is actually like aware of what I've done and happy and proud of what I've done and that's, that's something that I've really, really enjoyed

Erin 00:10:16 From where I sit. The coolest part of this is we're bringing Lens and search together more so a visual question that somebody asks. There's usually a grid of similar images that appear, but I'm really excited about our actually merging of both the search result page with the lens result page and that's gonna be rolling out over many, many months.

Rachid 00:10:37 So we talked about how this is a big change for search on the other end. I guess it's also a big change for Android in a way because you need to talk to the Android folks and tell them like hey, you know that button that you pressed to get home or that you swipe up to get home, we wanna extend the functionality of that. I'm wondering what that conversation was like because they're probably protective of that functionality.

Erin 00:11:00 Yeah, this was one of the more complicated things that we were mired in and Alistair can you remember the early days of the prototype? It was so hard to get the search folks to set up their Android device because it took a special Android build that you had to flash and it was very, very complicated. Um, and painful. We spent a ton of time thinking about what is the fastest way to access because we knew that could make or break the product. I'm really excited where we landed. We still have further to go and we're working a lot on making sure it's triggered when you want. It's not triggered when you don't want, but the main point was to make this be a system affordance as we talk about internally anywhere you are, regardless of the app, regardless of the state, you can trigger this. That was a key for us.

Alistair 00:11:45 I think we're also excited about the future. We think that this uh, universal access to the power of Google is really, really interesting and we have lots of ideas about what to do.

Rachid 00:11:57 Okay then, so let's say someone has a Pixel device, they have not tried Circle to Search yet. What is the first thing maybe they should try with Circle to Search? What do you think will give them the best impression of the features capable of,

Erin 00:12:09 I would say whatever app that they spend the most time in, whether it's social media or text messaging or what have you. If you have a pixel six and above and a pixel fold is now uh, supported as well, just try it out, trigger over anything and begin your circling experience and try even copying text. It's so silly to say I was so questioning whether we should include copy text in the product, but now I use it all the time, right? The ability to just really quickly grab something over any app.

Rachid 00:12:38 Alistair,

Alistair 00:12:39 I think that's absolutely right. Earlier on I was talking about how like I find text extremely useful but the visual search is truly magical and so I would like get onto a a social app or a, it works on video as well, so a like short form video app and the first time you see a beautiful building or a a natural spot and you don't know exactly where it is, just call on Circle to Search and that that, that first use really does feel magical and so I, I'd recommend that.

Erin 00:13:05 The other thing that I'm really excited about too and people do a lot is use your camera and then trigger Circle to Search. So I have a friend of mine who had this awesome water bottle that I was obsessed with and I just took out my Pixel, double tapped on the power button to bring up the camera, just pointed it at it triggered Circle to Search and bam I saw where I could buy that water bottle, what it was called, the price, et cetera. So I highly recommend that too.

Rachid 00:13:31 That's probably one that maybe you didn't think of when building the feature. It's only when you have it in your hands you're like, hey maybe I can actually sort of use the viewfinder in this way. Exactly.

Alistair 00:13:40 It's been fantastic to see users figure it out and try new things. So the viewfinder was one. We've also seen people ask such generative experiences like surprising questions about the things that they are soaking and oftentimes it just works. I play a word game called connections where you have to group words into groups of four and I was like wondering, hey, I wonder how STE works on that And it did. Okay.

Rachid 00:14:03 It sounds to me like you know, both of you feel this is one of the perhaps more rewarding things you've been working on at Google.

Erin 00:14:11 For sure. Two highlights to me over the last year of working on this project. The first was amazing. My kids when I got invited to visit Mr. Beast to shoot a video related to Circle to Search that we got him to circle a Feastibles video. Uh, Alistair mentioned it's really useful to grab things over a video and look something up and so that was really cool to spend three days at his compound in North Carolina. The other highlight for me is friends of mine who don't have an Android phone being really disappointed that they can't get this. Friends of mine who don't have Android say, Ooh, wow, I wish I had this. That is the coolest thing. And so I'm really, really proud of what we've done.

Alistair 00:14:53 Yeah, I had that experience last night. I was hanging out with some friends and we used Circle to Search and she was like, oh cool, show me how to do that. I was like, sorry, you can't, you're on an iPhone . Uh, so that was great. I talked about a number of the things I lack, I'll talk about two that are kind of in contrast. So one was the speed that this all came about with, like, I like to move really, really fast and as I mentioned, we had a prototype really quickly that was fantastic and then we moved extremely fast to bring it to market. We also spent a lot of time on quality and on polish making it a truly fantastic product before we shipped it and I'm very proud of that.

Erin 00:15:28 On the speed aspect, one of the most impressed I was as well was the team that we had. We were available in lots of time zones. So throughout the prototyping and as we were building towards launch, we had folks waking up in London to then hand off to folks on the East coast to hand off to folks on the West coast to be up super late if we needed to be. It was an amazing around the clock. The other thing, I think Alistair hinted at this as well, we could have added so much complexity, but we kept it simple, right? So often it's, it's very natural to think, oh, let me add one more thing or one more thing. And if we had done that, it could have distracted us. It also could have taken away from how simple and wonderful this is to just be nosy in a moment and pull up Circle to Search and circle that thing. So really awesome by the team to keep both of those things going.

Rachid 00:16:15 Aaron, Alistair, thank you so much for joining the Made by Google podcast and of course also for bringing us Circle to Search. I guess all of us will be circling a lot in the near future. Thank you again.

Erin 00:16:25 Thanks.

Alistair 00:16:26 Thanks for having us.

Voiceover 00:16:27 Thank you for listening to The Made by Google podcast. Don't miss out on new episodes. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to listen.