Google Announces Samsung Galaxy S24’s Circle to Search Feature for More Android Phones

Since the inception of Android, Google has been exploring innovative methods for smartphone-based search functionalities. Their latest venture is the ‘Circle to Search’ feature, which enables users to encircle information on their device screens to initiate searches.

Although officially named ‘Circle to Search,’ the feature also accommodates other actions like highlighting text and making scribbles, not just drawing oval shapes.

‘Circle to Search,’ is accessible anywhere on a device. Users need to either long-press the home button or, for those utilizing gesture navigation, the navigation bar, to activate the feature before beginning to circle items. Google promotes this new feature as a more convenient option compared to traditional methods such as taking screenshots and then using Google Lens for further analysis.

The ‘Circle to Search’ feature integrates Google’s AI-driven multisearch capability, a component of Google Lens introduced in 2022. Multisearch allows for a combination of text and image inputs in search queries, offering the flexibility to modify search parameters directly within the Google app.

This enhancement enables users to pose more complex questions involving specific concepts, ideas, or topics, with Google delivering concise, summarised responses in the answer box, eliminating the need to sift through extensive information pages.

The video below shows how it works.

Scheduled for a global launch on January 31, ‘Circle to Search’ will initially be exclusive to the Pixel 8 series and the newly released Samsung Galaxy S24 trio. Plans are in place to extend this feature to additional “premium Android smartphones” later in the year. Concurrently, an upgraded version of the multisearch functionality within the Google App is being made available to both Android and iOS users in the United States.