Google talks generative AI, voice and the future of search

The new age of search will embrace generative artificial intelligence and voice search and will be laser-focused on working with partners, according to a senior Google executive.

During a session at The Phocuswright Conference, Julie Farago, Google’s vice president of engineering for travel and local search, said that she leads a team of 700 engineers who handle two billion searches every day – 15% of which Google has never been asked before.

Searches other than text are growing rapidly, particularly voice. “We’re in this moment of evolution where we’re moving from questions to conversations, from people having to translate into Google-speak a question into a few succinct keywords that maybe gets the results that they want into something much more dialogue-forward,” Farago said. 

Generative AI is at the heart of Google’s search strategy.

“Travel is the perfect place to showcase what is possible in AI. Travel is an area that is extraordinarily complex to plan and there’s also very high stakes – emotionally and financially,” Farago said. “We’re absolutely using [generative AI] to accelerate our coding, how we do experimentation and how we understand the metrics that come out of the experiments.” 

Phocuswright managing director Pete Comeau also quizzed Farago on trust in an age of AI hallucination. Google is trying to be both “bold and responsible,” she said. “We label all gen AI results. We also do a huge amount of work on factuality and grounding, testing ourselves and evaluating our results.” 

She said that partnerships with the travel ecosystem remain vital. “By inspiring these trips and by connecting them to unique experiences then we can drive more highly qualified more confident folks into the travel ecosystem.”

Watch the full session below.

Following her Center Stage presentation, Farago spoke more about the potential for AI to transform the travel industry in an interview with Phocuswright senior vice president of content Mitra Sorrells in the PhocusWire studio.