Google has announced that Chromebook Plus laptops are getting a new systemwide text summarization feature, dubbed "Help me read."
With Help me read, you can instantly summarize long text with a right click. Just select a PDF file, a document, or a webpage, and Help me read will summarize it with key takeaways. Note that Help me read is different from Chrome's Reader Mode. At any rate, this feature sounds quite similar to how the Copilot sidebar in Edge can access the contents of the open page.
Google says Help me read was designed to help deepen your understanding of the topic at hand by letting you ask follow-up questions. "Next year, you can even highlight specific sentences or paragraphs you need extra help clarifying," the company added.
Large language models (LLMs) are effective at summarization. Help me read uses Gemini models running locally on-device instead in the cloud, but you'll need a Chromebook Plus instead of a regular Chromebook. The difference between Chromebook and Chromebook Plus is that the latter uses beefier hardware to support more advanced features.
A similar feature called Help me write is coming to Chromebook Plus laptops. As you can imagine, Help me write are your AI-powered features for creating new text from prompts, adjusting the tone of you writing, and more. You will access Help me write by pressing the Launcher key + F, which acts as a shortcut to other features like emoji and GIFs, a list of recent websites, Google Drive search, unit conversion, math, etc.
All Chromebook Plus laptops have the Gemini chatbot built-in and other AI features. These include Live Translation, which generates live captions in your language and works with any audio content, including Google Meet, Zoom, YouTube livestreams, personal videos, etc.
Also, Google Recorder is making a leap from Android to Chromebook Plus. With it, you can capture lectures, thoughts, and notes on your laptop, with automatic transcriptions detecting and labeling who's speaking. These and other AI features will become available through automatic updates rolling out in October.
Source: Google