Google has ‘paused’ the Ask Photos rollout

If you’re still waiting on access to Google’s AI-driven Ask Photos feature, you’ll need to hold tight a little longer. Jamie Aspinall, a product manager for Google Photos, chimed in to a conversation on X to address some complaints about the feature. “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and ux,” Aspinall . He said the rollout was being paused “at very small numbers” and that a new version of Ask Photos is slated to ship in about two weeks.

Ask Photos was at last year’s I/O conference and began select availability in September. The feature uses the Gemini AI chatbot to find images from a photo library based on natural language queries.

As with so many tech giants, Google’s implementation of AI-powered features to its services has hit several snags. The AI Overviews feature in search had a to users and its image-generation tool offered some at launch. Google has also seen critiques from and about its approach to artificial intelligence.