Made by Google 2024: Just a few AI options you would possibly’ve missed

Google’s annual Made by Google hardware event was held earlier Tuesday, and since the corporate introduced a lot stuff, so much received misplaced within the shuffle. We rounded up a number of the extra intriguing AI-related bulletins that didn’t get a ton of play, just like the image-generating Pixel Studio and Pixel Screenshots, which helps save and arrange data in screenshots.

Name Notes summarizes your conversations

For brief-term-memory-challenged of us like this author, Name Notes may very well be a helpful characteristic.

Accessible on the Pixel 9 family of devices, Name Notes saves a abstract of your dialog following a name. The main points — and a transcript — are saved to your cellphone’s name log.

Now if that feels like a possible privateness nightmare, you’re not fallacious. Google says that Name Notes runs totally on-device and notifies all individuals on the decision when recording is in progress — however we’ll should let the safety consultants weigh in.

Pixel Studio is a brand new image-generating app

Pixel Studio, unique to the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Professional and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, is an image-generating app powered each by an on-device generative AI mannequin and Google’s Imagen 3 mannequin working within the cloud. Pixel Studio enables you to enter prompts to generate no matter creatively strikes you, and add stickers and make edits and modifications after the actual fact.

Creations from Pixel Studio — which requires a gradual web connection to make use of, regardless of the on-device element — may be shared with contacts by way of Google Messages.

Google PR advised my colleague Ivan Mehta that Pixel Studio can’t generate human faces yet, presumably due to Gemini’s unlucky slip-ups earlier this year. However the spokesperson didn’t say whether or not there have been another safeguards to stop the app from producing doubtlessly dangerous pictures.

Pixel Screenshots are searchable

When you’re like me, you screenshot issues liberally — tickets, QR codes, boarding passes and what have you ever — for straightforward entry later. However screenshots aren’t precisely search-friendly. And that makes them an actual ache within the rear finish whenever you’re looking for one thing particular.

Fortuitously for soon-to-be Pixel 9 homeowners, there’s Pixel Screenshots, a brand new app that makes use of AI to research the content material of screenshots, together with any captured textual content, individuals and objects. Google Pictures already did this — however Pixel Screenshots works regionally.

Google provides this colourful instance: “Let’s say your good friend, who loves squirrels, has a birthday developing. It’s possible you’ll browse Google Chrome for a present for them, screenshotting squirrel shirts, squirrel coasters and every thing else squirrel-related you assume they could like. Pixel Screenshots will analyze the content material of all these pictures and make the data searchable for you within the app. So all you’ll have to do is open the app and seek for ‘squirrel,’ and these outcomes will pop up. Even higher, it would embrace hyperlinks to the place you discovered every thing and a abstract of what you’re taking a look at with related data.”

Pixel Screenshots can even helpfully seek for issues like door codes and addresses throughout pictures.