Google Lens now lets you record videos to add voice context to your searches

In April 2022, Google added Multisearch support to Google Lens, with a worldwide rollout occurring almost a year later, in February 2023. Multisearch allows you to add supplemental queries to your initial search to refine the results further. However, the process of adding context always felt clunky, as you could only add it after Lens had performed the search. Google is now refining Lens’ Multisearch capabilities with a “Speak now to ask about this image” feature.

The next time you trigger Google Lens, the search icon will glow and animate to attract your attention. Tapping on it will show a “search with voice” tooltip and inform you about this change. Instead of clicking a picture and then doing a search, you can press and hold the search button to record a video with Lens and add relevant context with audio. The search results will account for the added context.

In a post on X, Android guru Mishaal Rahman demonstrated the feature in action. In the video, he added context to his search using audio, which Lens incorporated into the results.

Search with video in Google Lens appears to be rolling out widely

This feature was spotted in development in June of this year, so Google has been relatively quick with its public rollout. It’s already available on all my Android phones, suggesting this is a server-side push. If the feature is not live on your phone, ensure you are running the latest Google app and Lens build on your phone.

Over the last year or so, Google has introduced several innovative ways to trigger a search on Android with added context. This improvement to Google Lens is another addition to that list.

Google recently added a nifty grid view to Lens so you can easily retrace your past image search history. It is reportedly also working on bringing Circle to Search functionality to Google Lens.