Google's betting that AI search needs to speak everyone's language. The company announced today that AI Mode — its conversational search feature that's been English-only since March — now works in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese.
Key Points:
- First language expansion for AI Mode after six months of English-only access
- Uses Gemini 2.5 to understand local context, not just translate words
- Part of Google's push to make AI Mode the default search experience
This isn't just Google running text through a translator. The company says its custom version of Gemini 2.5 actually understands local information and cultural context in each language. That means when you ask complex questions — the kind that used to take multiple searches — you'll get answers that make sense for your region, not just generic responses.
AI Mode is Google's answer to ChatGPT Search and Perplexity. It lets you have actual conversations with search, ask follow-up questions, and get comprehensive answers pulled from real-time web data. You access it through a dedicated tab on Google's search page or at google.com/ai. The feature has already rolled out to more than 180 countries in English over the past month, but language support has been the missing piece.
The expansion matters because it opens up advanced search capabilities to millions who've been locked out by the language barrier. A student in Jakarta can now research complex topics in Indonesian. A business owner in São Paulo can dig into market analysis in Portuguese. They're getting the same multimodal features — text, voice, images — that English speakers have had since spring.
Google says AI Mode is "one of our most popular Search features — now used by more than a billion people" though that number likely includes AI Overviews, the simpler AI summaries that appear in regular search results. AI Mode goes deeper, using what Google calls a "query fan-out" technique that runs multiple searches simultaneously to build comprehensive answers.
What's notable is how fast Google's moving here. The feature only launched to premium subscribers in March, went wide in the U.S. in May, and now it's going global with multiple languages. That's aggressive even by Google standards. The company clearly sees this as the future of search — and it's racing to get there before competitors lock in users with their own AI search tools.
Google says more languages are coming, though they haven't specified which ones or when.