Google's Stories to use artificial intelligence to create stories like Snapchat and Instagram

Google's Stories is exploring ways to bring more immersive visual content with ‘stories’.

They will start curating stories using artificial intelligence algorithms to construct AMP stories and surface them in Search. They will provide a glimpse of facts and important moments of notable people in a rich and visual format. The format will help you to easily tap to gather more information and discover unique content from the web.

What are Stories and why they matter?

Snapchat was the first major vendor who created the photo and video montages to create a tool called Stories in October 2013. People liked the idea of getting a quick gist of all the day-to-day references which led to its increased popularity. Facebook further popularized it after copying the feature into all of its major popular apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

It have become the latest social media marketing tool which is extensively used for personal use and by businesses/startups. Its extensive use on various social media channels has left many confused for good reason. A key question of everyone’s mind is: Is it worth putting in the time and effort to create something that will just disappear in the next 24 hours?

Google plays catch up with SnapChat and Instagram

Google is now in the race pushing themselves deeper into Stories. Since February, they have already allowed some publishers to create AMP visual storytelling for delivering news and latest updates using tap-through stories.

The Google team will start using artificial intelligence techniques to create stories that will appear in Google searches and image results. According to the company’s blog post, they will create them first around well-renowned people--like celebrities, and athletes. Later scaling and expanding it to other categories. Google's stories will be curated using artificial intelligence techniques, but will still require human moderators to review them to ensure there aren’t any severe mistakes or issues.

They will be doubling their efforts to bring Stories into the search engine. More updates and announcements will be made in the next few months, said Cathy Edwards, Google’s head of engineering for image search.

What's next for Stories?

Google’s big step and positive confidence in the Stories tool is yet another signal that this new format is here to stay. With all major vendors adopting the tool within their channels, it will be interesting to see what new techniques and features will be added to this format. Stories no-doubt has become incredibly popular on Snapchat and Facebook-owned apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. If we look at the current usage, more than 400 million people use Instagram stories and 450 million use WhatsApp’s version of stories daily.

We will start seeing more companies start advertising in Stories in order to turn all the user interest into actual revenue. If we look at the current scenario, they are more popular with users than advertisers. The key reason for it is because most of the ads are vertical video ads which are relatively a new format and takes a considerable amount of time for companies to create them. We can expect Google to start putting ads in the stories at some point down the line.