Chrome experimental AI features

[butz]

Soon you won't need to browse the web at all, Chrome will do everything for you: watch youtube ads, click on sponsored links, write positive reviews for restaurants buying ads from adsense, and write negative reviews for ones not advertising with google, fight with edge which browser is the default one. On the bright side, you will be able to enjoy more time offline.

[disqard]

Your comment reminded me of Douglas Adams' Electric Monk:

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

[bradgessler]

I look forward to AI blocking ads after it gets tired of clicking through all of them.

[summerlight]

As a tab hoarder, I remember there were some attempts to implement rule-based tab organizer (using features like tab name, url, etc...) but most of them were only marginally useful for my case.

I wondered if generative models make any differences here so just tried it and a bit disappointed, it's consistently returning an error with a message "Tab groups suggestions are currently unavailable". It's just launched and the team might be experiencing lots of pages, perhaps I should try this again later.

[Al_Ptr]

Have you tried ToChunkA Smart TabS extension(https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tochunka-smart-tabs...)?

It organizes tabs and bookmarks by content similarity and does little more. Designed for tab hoarders in mind. :)

[punkspider]

How did you use it? I'm trying with Chrome Beta but it doesn't seem to have the option to organize tabs.

I looked in Experiments and it's not there either.

It's updated to the latest version.

[yanis_t]

Here are some better ideas from the top of my head:

- summarise an article

- find information on a given topic (free-form input text)

- full voice control ("click that link", "read that article", "find this")

- auto-submit a captcha

[rschiavone]

> "auto-submit a captcha"

we have come full circle

[bane]

Take this tab collection, build a model or a RAG or whatever around them:

- Let me chat with a bot that knows the information from the collection

- Use the information to generate a summary

- Let me guide it in generating a well sourced article

Build a knowledge graph from the web

- Trace a source of information back to the originating point to help eliminate derivative blog spam

- Help moderate media bias and challenge echo chambers

Automatically recognize spam, scams, etc.

Let me describe something I need in text, return back links to shopping sites that sell that thing, if nobody has it, generate a 3d model, or more formal description of it and supply me with connections to let me farm it out to an additive manufacture, one-off makerspace place or something.

[marricks]

Seriously, their first example seems useless to most people. Naming a tab group??? That doesn't take any time, little thought, and who does that regularly?

Summarizing an article seems like something everyone else can do OK. It's a huge avenue for bias (maybe that's why it's reasonably elided) but at least it's actually useful.

[ehsankia]

1. This is actually a feature on Pixel through the assistant [0], surprised it's not on Chrome itself

2. That doesn't really seem like a Chrome feature? Belongs more on Bard.

3. That seems like a Google Assistant feature too, some of that actually may work on a pixel phone, though might be nice to have on desktop too.

4. Will never happen. Google themselves have a captcha product so defeats the point.

[0] https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/14163109?hl=en

[lawlessone]

Watch an ad so i don't have to

[rockooooo]

AI theme generation really seems like a solution looking for a problem

[voidhorse]

The vast majority of AI development right now fits the solution looking for a problem mold. People are pushing hard for the adoption of LLMs in areas where the existing solutions are not only more predictable, but require equivalent or less effort to using an LLM.

At some point the hype will die down and we'll find out where these tools actually fit, but yeah right now it's madness.

[duxup]

It is a neat "it can do that" kinda thing but I also wondered when I need that.

Having said that chrome customization has always kinda bit me in the butt eventually when something changes and looks odd now and ... I just tend to avoid it altogether now.

[chankstein38]

Yeah honestly I just want my browser to be dark and not spam me with stuff when I open a new tab. I don't need some fancy picture.

[darkhorse222]

The last thing I want is further telemetry from Chrome to Google. I'm so glad I switched to Firefox. This should be an API, not a browser integration.

[crummy]

an API to group your browser tabs..?

[Communitivity]

I had a thought while reading this, and I don't know if this would be the case but...

If it works by you hover over a link and Google gets the content in the browser behind the scenes and sends it to the mothership, where it's summarized and the summary then sent back to you to be displayed by the browser, then you may be accessing the linked page using your stored credentials, which give Google access to content they wouldn't otherwise have access to.

[lxgr]

The same is true for translations in most browsers, right? At least I'm not aware of any browser that does it client-side/offline.

Edit: I stand corrected, Firefox does it offline! Thank you, Firefox team, this is awesome and I'll likely be using it more often now :)

[comprev]

Sounds like a sneaky way to add your personal social media feed into their AI training data.

Edit: the suggestion that translation functionality already does this is valid though perhaps this expands the scope to data in the users default language?

[Hoefner]

I hope the Chrome devs will add some features like those in Arc browser, such as summarizing content while hovering over a link and pressing Shift.

[lukan]

That would be useful, but also probably quite expensive, if every chrome user use this feature?

[jklinger410]

I hope the Arc Browser team makes their Chromium based project as cross-platform as Chromium itself.

[gr__or]

Kind of amazing how unable to deliver Google seems to be here. Looking at Arc, a new player, and the kind of AI features they came up with, this here looks more like features developed by McKinsey rather than by someone with domain knowledge.

[ugh123]

Love the textarea integration. I wish Chrome could do a better job of saving "drafts" and/or backing up text somehow. Adding long content is a constant worry for me to lose it somehow to an error or accidentally closed tab.

[ehsankia]

Absolutely. For the longest time I had this extension called "Comment Save" which saved anything you typed in a textarea. It doesn't seem to exist anymore, and I haven't been able to find a good replacement. I would also much rather have it in the browser than giving full permission to some third party.

The back button in Chrome sometimes help but I still lose long messages all the time.

[worksonmine]

Anyone else have AI fatigue yet? I haven't even tried GPT and I'm already sick of AI this LLM that.

[danielbln]

You haven't tried what would only be called science fiction 4 years ago but are tired of it? The hype machine is grating, but do try a Gen AI model. I use it for code, for ideation, for various NLP tasks. It's at the very least moderately useful in various tasks, and extremely useful in some.

edit: tone

[rldjbpin]

you are not alone, and ironically i work in this field lol

[smusamashah]

I have a chrome extension [1] which lets you re-write your selected text, or look-it up via ChatGPT using your own custom prompts. Gives you more control on what kind of suggestions or answers you want basically.

Won't help with rearranging/grouping tabs, but can definitely help rephrase text in input fields or looking up info.

[1]: https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT

[esha_manideep]

Having a feature to summarise the website would be a much better than the first two. As I constantly find myself wishing for such a feature :/

[jsf01]

I’ve been working on a project [1] to do just that from within a Chrome extension. The idea was that as an extension, it could make use of the context menu and feel more like a native feature of the browser. I’m always hesitant to link to my things from comments but in this case I think it’s a perfect fit for what you’re describing.

[1] https://smudge.ai

[rockemsockem]

I suspect Google is afraid of getting sued by more publishers :/

[amf12]

The linked post links to another blog which is about this.

[renewiltord]

The Arc browser I use has that feature on hover.

[everdrive]

I don't want any AI features in anything. Yet another reason to avoid Chrome. I have Chrome installed solely to watch netflix on Linux.

[phillipcarter]

I really wish the first part of this article had an explicit "Here is how you get started" section. I just about missed it because it's a paragraph that links to a support article. If they want people to actually use this stuff, why not make turning it on front and center?

[Imnimo]

This feels like a VP at Google told the Chrome team they needed more AI.

[lulzx]

Again features nobody cares about

[ncann]

The only "AI feature" I use in Chrome is the live caption one for French (which requires Chrome Canary). I use it to get automatic live caption while listening to French podcast since I'm learning the language. It's buggy as hell though, so if anyone has a suggestion on a replacement that would be much appreciated!

[dougb5]

I wonder if this "Help me write" will give different suggestions from the Google Docs "Help me write" feature, or from the dozens of other help-me-write features that are cropping up these days within text-oriented webapps (e.g. Notion).

[seydor]

what i want is 'read aloud', like MS Edge

[Solvency]

It's absolutely wild that this isn't the first thing anyone would make there. ChatGPTs talk mode is so good, I'd kill for the ability to listen to longform articles at varying speeds/voices.

[TOMDM]

Edge is honestly slowly turning into a better Chrome, and the better parts aren't even the LLM craze.

If they keep it up, this might actually threaten Googles browser dominance.

On the AI end though Microsoft aggresively pursues support for other AI providers (Mistral and Lamma both being on Azure API's now), Google tying themselves to Gemini seems to be tying themselves to the best they can do while Microsoft seems to be accruing the best they can get.

[littlekey]

Anyone else think the whole idea of "tab management" tools is crazy? The way to manage tabs is to close them.

[layer8]

Or filtering and searching. Anything you can have a large number of should have an obvious filtering & searching UI. After how many decades of UI are we still so behind on basic usability design.

[eviks]

If you don't limit yourself to only the closing one part of management, you might see the reason behind the craze

[pixelbath]

And if you'd like to read it later, bookmark it! You can organize bookmarks into groups, give them custom names, and they don't require the browser to be constantly hoarding multiple gigabytes of RAM.