Search Live gets ready to follow Gemini with a colorful visual update

The Google app’s Search Live lets you have a spoken, conversational interaction with AI Mode, where you can freely ask follow-up questions or interrupt the app to redirect it mid-response. The Search Live UI has looked more or less the same since the feature debuted last year, but we’ve now seen evidence that a pretty significant visual overhaul is in the works.

Poking around beta version 17.18.22.sa.arm64 of the Google app, we managed to get a look at a slick new animation that plays when interacting with Search Live. We also spotted a mild refresh of the Google app’s home screen that ditches Google’s Nano Banana branding.

In the updated version of Search Live, a purplish-blue hue bounces around the edges of the screen as you speak; as Search Live responds, a color-changing light coming from the bottom of the display shifts around to match the speech. The update doesn’t seem to change much of anything functionally, but it’s a pleasing animation nonetheless.

The Google app’s home screen is getting a bit of a touch-up, too. An upcoming version we saw has proportionally smaller buttons under its search bar, with the Search Live button newly labeled Talk, and the image generation button — a banana emoji, in the app’s current state — changed to a stylized icon of a stack of photos along with the word Create.

The change brings to mind another colorful refresh we spotted in progress for the Gemini app last week. These changes aren’t live yet, even in the latest beta version of the Google app. But that we were able to get a look at the work-in-progress UI tweaks should mean they’ll be rolling out publicly in the near future.