Google’s generative AI is coming to Chrome: here’s how it will help you every day
One of the most popular applications for generative artificial intelligence is text composition, and in recent months we have witnessed an explosion of services of this type applied to browsers, from Copilot of Microsoft, to move on from Opera and end up with the myriad of extensions for ChatGPT (here is a selection of the best AI apps).
Google has also introduced a feature writing help for some of its services such as Messages, Gmail, Docs And Keep (at least on a trial basis), and now it looks like he’s about to launch it up too Chrome desktop.
The tool, called “Help me write” (Help me write), was discovered by the guys at 9to5Google in the contributions to Chromium Gerrit, and according to what we read in the documents it is internally defined as Compose or CCO.
But how will it work? It’s difficult to do at the moment exact predictionsas no one has seen it in action yet and they can only be done assumptions reading the comments on the code contributions, but it seems that when you will have to insert a online text you will be offered a writing option directly in a popup window or manually from context menu (the one that appears when you click with the right mouse button).
Unlike others solutions similar, which rely exclusively on a your prompt so you can tell the AI what you want it to write, here it looks like Google’s AI will be able to control the page content to get more context on what to write.
As regards the applications, it seems that Help me write can be used for “obtain suggestions of contextual writing for reviews, posts and more“, and you can “include things like: a few words that summarize yours thoughts, a first draft, requests like “write a 5-star review for this restaurant“”.
Obviously the tool is intended for writing short, uncovered texts, and there will be fewer options than the solution that Google introduced in Docs. For example, you can adjust the writing style, but only for “shorten” or “to elaborate” the text, and ask something in a more tone “informal” or “formal“.
From the point of view of privacy, there is an annotation indicating how the tool “Send opened pages, related recent pages, their URLs, and your interactions with those features to Google. This data can be read, processed and annotated by human reviewers to improve and develop Google products. You can change this at any time in the settings“.
At the moment we don’t know when Help me write will be available. The function is hidden behind two flags (in chrome://flags), but cannot be activated yet as a “buildflag” separate.
These are the flags connected, but as we said they are not yet active:
- CCO Edits
- Enables CCO editing feature
- #CCO
- Autofill Content Editables
- When enabled, adds support for content editables in autofill.
- #AUTOFILL-CONTENT-EDITABLES
It also appears that, at least initially, it will not be released for i Chromebooks, as Google had anticipated a similar solution, but at the system level, for Chromebook Plus. Apparently, GrandeG is looking for a way to activate it in non-Plus devices with browser-only ChromeOS.
On the timing, it is unlikely that it will be released, even on an experimental basis, before Chrome 122scheduled for February 2024but even then it will probably not be accessible in Italian, as all these Google AI writing tools are currently accessible exclusively in English.
9to5Google