Samsung’s much-hyped Circle to Search feature, which was part of the huge slate of AI-related features introduced for the Galaxy S24 family, was soon revealed to not be exclusive to the Korean company in any way. The day after announcing the S24, Google coincidentally unveiled the same feature for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.
It was then said that Google’s Circle to Search would start rolling out on January 31st, and indeed it did. According to multiple reports on Reddit, it’s now available on both the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. This isn’t via a firmware update, by the way, it appears to be a server-side switch, so it just “magically” appears.
If you have one of Google’s newer smartphones, note that you won’t receive any indication that Circle to Search is active. Try using it and it should work – that is, assuming this isn’t one of Google’s soft brand launches.
Circle to Search works anywhere on your phone. To activate it you have to long press the navigation bar and then you can simply start circling and highlighting items on the screen. It’s much faster and easier to use than Google Lens, but it uses the same backend as Lens, which supports multimodal search queries so you can use both text and images.
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