Here's the output from two tests I ran:
1. Asking Nano Banana Pro to solve the word search puzzle directly [1].
2. Asking Nano Banana Pro to highlight each word on the grid, with the position of every word included as part of the prompt [2].
The fact that it gets 2 words correct demonstrates meaningful progress, and it seems like we're really close to having a model that can one-shot this problem soon.
There's actually a bit of nuance required to solve this puzzle correctly which an older Gemini model struggled to do without additional nudging. You have to convert the grid or word list to use matching casing (the grid uses uppercase, the word list uses lowercase), and you need to recognize that "soup mix" needs to have the space removed when doing the search.
This may even work if you tell it to do all that prior to figuring out what to create for the image,
For generating the prompt which included the word positions I had Gemini 3 Pro do that using the following prompt: "Please try to solve this word search puzzle. Give me the position of each word in the grid. Then generate a prompt which I can pass to Nano Banana Pro, which I will pass along with the same input image to see if Nano Banana Pro is able to properly highlight all the words if given their correct position."