Chrome adds AI feature to make common tasks easier

So far, Google Chrome has launched 3 Generative AI features and many more Gemini-integrated features are being introduced this year.

“We’re thinking about how to bring AI technology to the browser to make typical actions you do every day — using tabs, searching, writing in forms, reading web pages — a little easier,” said Adriana Porter Felt, director of engineering at Chrome . “We’ve been gathering ideas from across the Chrome team.”

“When we think about the future of Chrome, we just think, ‘How can we make it as useful as possible?’” says Adriana.

Of those four common tasks, the current feature set doesn’t address “use search” or “read a webpage .” “Read a webpage” could summarize articles, while “use search” could integrate with SGE. Chrome’s address bar just added the @Gemini shortcut for quick access to gemini.google.com.

The process of developing LLM-powered features involves taking the platform model and “teaching it what we want to do for sample use cases and then evaluating how it performs with a variety of different user scenarios . ”

Google launched its “Organize Similar Tabs” feature in January, with a tab organizer that uses emojis to make it easier to scan these groups. One concern is making sure Chrome doesn’t pick up something inappropriate:

With help from the emoji team, Google has mapped out what types of tab grouping categories are safe to use widely. “Travel, animals, places, nature are great use cases for emoji, so we know that automatic tab organization has a chance of getting it right by relying on those categories,” says Adriana .

Meanwhile, the theme builder didn’t implement the open prompt as originally planned after finding that “it’s really hard to come up with a prompt for this .” Instead, like on Android, it offers a variety of drop-down menus: Subject, Style, and Mood. In this case, the “narrower option” would have worked better, while also ensuring that it wasn’t used as a generic text-to-image tool.

Finally, Help me write will first gather context about the site: “It can see you want to write a restaurant review and tailor that to you rather than helping you fill out a form or sell something . ”