- Google’s Pixel event was all about AI.
- It’s Gemini Live assistant is a real chatterbox.
- Pixel Screenshots are the closest thing to useful we’ve seen yet.
Gemini Live won’t shut up unless you interrupt it, but some of Google’s new Gemini AI features look genuinely useful.
Google recently showed us its new Pixel lineup, two months earlier than usual, at the Made by Google event, and the story was—surprise, surprise—all about AI. There’s the new, too-chatty Gemini Live voice assistant, a bunch of lame photo enhancement tools, and the obligatory copyright-skirting image-generation feature. Let’s take a look at the best and worst of Google’s latest AI toys.
“Google’s Gemini is incredible tech embedded in Android 15. It has some really exciting features like Pixel Screenshots, which can search your screenshots for information. It is a time-saving tool that’s both practical and forward-thinking. And Gemini Live voice chat, which could change real-time communication by adding AI to conversations,” Steven Athwal, founder and managing director of UK refurbished phone retailer The Big Phone Store, told Lifewire via email. “But Gemini’s AI image generation has me scratching my head. As someone who has always put ethics first in business, I can’t help but wonder about the copyright implications of this feature. It’s a fantastic tool but the repercussions could be far-reaching and not necessarily in a positive way.”
Chattier GPT
The promise of AI is, of course, an intelligent assistant that you can just talk to, like the computers in every sci-fi utopia ever. As we’ve seen, just including the word “intelligence” in the name doesn’t actually make it intelligent, but these LLMs (large language models) are better at working out what we’re saying than previous efforts. And according to The Verge’s Alex Cranz, Google’s Gemini Live is actually pretty good at finding things out for you. When she tested the new assistant, it managed to give her an answer in seconds to a problem that had taken her and a friend five minutes between them.
That might partially be an indictment of Google’s regular search, but it’s quite good. The problem, though, is the same as with any AI chatbot: you never know whether to believe it. After Google’s own pizza glue debacle, why should we trust this version?
Also, says Cranz, Gemini Live won’t shut up. Like that annoying uncle at a family dinner, Gemini will keep droning on and on until you interrupt it.
Screenshot Magic
Google also demonstrated several image tools. There’s the Pixel Studio app, which generates images in response to text prompts, and the results have the same hyper-real AI look we’ve come to expect. More interesting is the Magic Editor, which lets you type in a prompt to make changes to your own photos.
For example, you could circle the sky with a finger and then tell it to replace the sky with something else. In the demo reel, Google added flowers and balloons to a field.
Even more gimmicky, but also kinda neat, is a feature called “Add Me.” This lets you snap a photo of a friend, then you switch places. An AR overlay shows you where to stand, and then the AI stitches together the pictures into one composite.
Then we get to maybe the best “AI” feature in the whole demo. It’s called Pixel Screenshots, and it lets you finally make use of all those screenshots you took to remember things.
Screenshots aren’t the best way to archive webpages, chats, or photos, but they are easy and come with a built-in button combo on most devices. In recent years, our photo apps have used machine-learning (aka OG AI) tools to make the text in screenshots searchable, but Pixel Screenshots does one better.
It essentially dives into your screenshots and lets you search on them. Google’s example is that you’re researching a gift for a friend who loves squirrels (!), and you spend a while screenshotting the best ones you find. Later, you ask Pixel Screenshots what that gift was, and it shows you.
It’s a lot like Microsoft’s privacy-destroying Recall feature, which snaps screenshots of everything you do on your computer for later search. But because Pixel Screenshots only uses screenshots you have saved yourself, many of the privacy issues go away.
All in all, Google’s AI announcements are more of the same. While there are some neat little features in there, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that we’d all be just as well off without them. This is still a technology desperately looking for a real-world application, which—for consumer-level products—may never arrive.
“AI’s promise is in enterprise, medical, and industrial applications—not hype-driven consumer tech. Responsible, problem-focused development is key. Avoiding spectacle and focusing AI on actual issues will build a better future. Google and Apple would benefit from pragmatism over hype,” Gary Gilkison, an executive and marketing analyst for iHost Property Management, told Lifewire via email.
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- These Are the Best (and Worst) New Google Gemini Features
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