Google Arts & Culture is turning 15, and instead of simply celebrating with a birthday cake and a few nostalgic posts, Google is giving the app a pretty substantial makeover.

The refreshed Google Arts & Culture app is built around a more visual and conversational experience, making it easier to explore everything from famous paintings and historical artifacts to fashion, science, food and destinations around the world. At the center of the redesign is a new AI-powered conversational search that lets you ask questions in your own words and receive answers accompanied by visuals and curated stories from Google’s network of cultural partners.

It is a notable change for an app that has spent the past 15 years digitizing and opening up cultural collections to people who might never get to visit the institutions themselves.

Google says it has worked with more than 3,000 cultural institutions and artists across more than 90 countries over the past 15 years. The platform now covers a remarkably broad mix of subjects, including high-resolution artworks, archaeological artifacts in 3D, fashion, performance art, sports, crafts, culinary heritage, natural history, science, design and nature.

The new search experience is designed to make all of that material feel less like a giant digital archive and more like something you can actually have a conversation with.

Ask about Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro, for example, and the app can bring together an explanation with relevant visual material. You can also ask for things such as Impressionist museums in Paris, images captured by the Webb telescope, an explanation of bento boxes or, because apparently the internet can never have enough cats, cats in art.

The important part is that the answers aren’t just text. Google says the conversational search pairs explanations with visuals and curated stories drawn from its cultural archives.

The homepage is getting a major rethink, too.

Rather than presenting the app as a collection of separate destinations, the redesigned homepage brings its content together into a single feed. The feed is designed around quick cultural discoveries, with bite-sized stories, daily highlights and shortcuts to interactive experiences.

And this is where Google’s AI experiments start getting particularly interesting.

One of the new additions is Chrono Look, which lets users virtually try on historical clothing from different eras and regions. The experience uses sketches and realistic renderings to show what historical attire might look like on you, turning something that could otherwise feel like a history lesson into something much more interactive.

Then there’s Dial-an-Artist, which takes a very different approach. The experiment lets users have simulated conversations with historical artists about their work and creative journeys.

Obviously, you’re not actually calling up a long-dead artist for a chat. But the idea is to use AI as an interactive layer over historical and cultural information rather than simply presenting another page of text to read.

Google is also expanding its City Guide feature. The redesigned experience adds 27 new destinations, giving users access to cultural landmarks and real-time cultural events in those locations.

That makes the app slightly more useful outside the museum-at-home scenario, too. Instead of simply looking at a painting from halfway around the world, you can use Arts & Culture to find things to see and experience when you’re actually visiting a city.

The redesign is rolling out globally starting September 28, with the updated app available through Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Fifteen years after Google Arts & Culture began bringing museum collections and cultural archives onto our screens, the project is entering a very different era. The first challenge was getting the world’s cultural material online. Now that enormous archive exists, Google is increasingly experimenting with ways to make it easier to navigate, understand and interact with.

And judging by this redesign, Google thinks the next step isn’t simply giving us more things to look at. It is giving us more ways to ask questions about them.