The Family History AI Show EP34: 2025 Mid-Year AI Review, FamilySearch Full-Text Goes Live, Nano Banana Photo Restoration Tips, AI's Environmental Impact
Sep 29, 2025
Co-hosts dive into the groundbreaking AI advancements of 2025, highlighting DeepSeek's open-source impact and the innovative features of GPT-5. They celebrate FamilySearch's Full-Text Search going live, allowing access to 1.4 billion records. Listeners learn photo restoration tips using Nano Banana, including when it's effective. The duo also discusses the environmental implications of AI, Google’s new mobile app features, and a significant antitrust ruling reshaping the search landscape. Expect engaging insights from real genealogists using AI to uncover family histories!
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Episode notes
Full-Text Search Unlocks Hidden Records
- FamilySearch's Full-Text Search moved from labs to the main site and indexes hard-to-search, text-heavy records.
- Full-text plus OCR opens billions of records previously only reachable by manual image review.
Use Summaries And Filters To Triage Hits
- Use the new 'summarize this document' button to quickly triage full-text hits before reading transcriptions.
- Filter full-text results by who, when, and where to narrow large result sets effectively.
AI Revealed Draft-Era Travel Motives
- A researcher used AI to explain an ancestor's odd Civil War draft-avoidance route by providing historical draft context.
- The AI suggested plausible motives that guided the researcher toward primary sources for verification.