Google announced on Tuesday that it’s joining the AI laptop party by baking new smart features into its new generation of Chromebook Plus computers.
The new features include “Help Me Write,” AI-generated videoconferencing backgrounds, Magic Editor for photos, and direct access to Google’s gen AI agent Gemini directly from a Chromebook’s home screen.
Help Me Write uses AI to help a user create text from scratch using a prompt or rewriting existing text to change its tone, modify its length, or recast it entirely.
The background feature will work with any videoconferencing app and includes a variety of prompts to build backgrounds.
Magic Editor is accessible within the Google Photos app. Users can edit objects in a photo by tapping or circling them, then dragging them to reposition or resize them with a pinch. In addition, contextual suggestions can be used to improve the lighting and background in a photo.
On the new Chromebook Plus, Gemini can be called up with a tap of an icon on the home screen. Google is also offering new Chromebook Plus users a 12-month free trial of its advanced Google One AI Premium plan. It features access to Gemini Advanced, 2TB of storage, and Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and more.
Rejuvenation Needed
Google had to do something to rejuvenate the Chromebook category, maintained Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research in Las Vegas. “The Chromebook experience has become long in the tooth,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Chromebook Plus laptops are a step forward for the Chromebook category, but I think the Microsoft/Qualcomm approach has a big advantage,” he added.
Last week, Microsoft announced its Copilot+ laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, which include powerful neural processing units (NPUs) to optimize AI operations.
“The Chromebook experience has always been a cloud experience,” Vena explained. “The path that Microsoft and Qualcomm are going down is to build AI into their chips so you have a better AI experience locally than in the cloud. You can run a lot of this AI stuff locally without having to depend on an internet connection.”
“The other advantage is security,” he added. “No matter how secure Google says its cloud is, there’s no substitute for doing things locally.”
Unprecedented AI Integration
Rubin noted that Google’s announcement does not compare to Recall, the signature feature of the CoPilot+ laptops.
Recall enables users to find information they’ve previously encountered on their PCs via natural language and contextual search. For example, a user could ask CoPilot+ to “Find an article I read last week about Dr. Who,” and it would. Images and screenshots can be found, too, simply by describing them. Context can also be added to searches, as Recall remembers interactions across applications and time.
Power and Flexibility