Samsung’s much-touted “circle search” feature was part of a raft of AI-related features it rolled out for the Galaxy S24 series, but it quickly turned out to not be unique to the Korean company. The day after the S24 was released, Google inadvertently rolled out the same feature for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.
Google’s Circle to Search was said to be rolling out starting on January 31st, and that’s indeed the case. According to multiple reports on Reddit, the feature is now available on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. BTW this is not achieved via firmware update, it appears to be a server side switch so it just “magically” appears.
If you own one of Google’s latest smartphones, be aware that you won’t receive any indication that Circle to Search is live. Just try it and it will work – that is, assuming this isn’t one of Google’s trademark phased rollouts.
Circle search works from anywhere on your phone. To activate it, you need to long-press on the navigation bar, and then you can start looping and highlighting items on the screen. It’s faster and easier to use than Google Lens, but it uses the same backend as Lens and supports multi-modal search queries so you can work with both text and images.